ab.ii

The bakery smelled of rising yeast and baking sugars;
it was a scent that helped realtors sell show homes but had no impact on her
senses any longer. She’d smelled it five days a week for fifty one weeks for each
of the last five years, and her brain didn’t register the scent anymore.

Somewhere in the recesses, she knew that she smelled
of baking until she showered each night, and that the breads and buns and pies
and cakey bits lingered on her as she road the bus back to Racine Street every
afternoon, but it wasn’t a conscious knowledge. She wouldn’t have worried about
it even if it was conscious both because she figured most people would be drawn
to the smell and because the happenings of the world around her meant almost nothing.
She moved through the sourdough loaves to the rye loaves to the cookies to the
pies like an automaton, hearing Barry bark orders for the next and the next and
the next baked goods on the list, even hearing him criticize her for a slightly
dark batch of chocolate chip cookies, without anything he said denting her
thoughts, because her thoughts were of him.

The bakery was a step in a day she needed to get
through to get back to him, and all she could think of was him as she baked,
then baked some more, then cleaned.

There was something
lingering from their time together last night, something she couldn’t grasp
with her mind fingers, something just out of reach, but she felt like it was a
message he’d given her as they held hands by the breakwater, so she let her
fingers and arms do their customary work, and she wandered through her memories
of their last visit in search of a message that eluded her. Seagulls. The
breakwater. The distant lighthouse. The waves. His calloused hand intertwined
with hers. What was the message