Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

I can admit that in those days I was sometimes jealous of the dough my husband put his hands into, worked so tenderly and tirelessly with, up to the elbows.

But then what, when there was nothing left of the bread to improve? What then. Eat of it and be filled. Eat of it and be transformed. Eat of it and nothing changes. The almost-imperceptible recalibration of our desire, our satisfaction. Try again.

Would anyone believe me if I said I felt an intimacy with her even then?

I am a woman talking to you all of the time, wanting to feed words back to you, because you gave me so many, pushed them down my throat until I choked and enjoyed the choking, until the words spread through my blood, until I lit up.

It was hard to find the exact place on the glass where his lips had been, though I inspected the rim, I made my best guess and put my lips there too.

I have always been a sort of archivist, glutting myself on what has been left behind.

And this made it worse, the idea that he wanted for nothing, and it was just me who was alone with my desire like a ragged hole in my chest.

The trick is forgetting for one moment and then forgetting for another moment and then look, the moments run together like a string of beads, and there is heartbreak in the forgetting of heartbreak, in the forgetting of pain, which returns bright and pulsing regardless of the seconds it has been put aside. Do not leave me here, it tells you. Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you.

Do you lay bread on your tongue and think of me, Violet, do you swallow it like a sacrament, do you still get down on your knees?

Nobody, at the beginning, believes they will debase themselves for love. Nobody believes in anything else but joy.

Sometimes I think of you as an ant I could burn under a magnifying glass, if I just look closely enough.

What have I done? you asked me sometimes, never what has been done to me?

We are so often wrong about those we love, slowly debasing ourselves, so gradually we barely notice we’re doing it.

I’ve been looked at in pity and in fear and I’ve learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire. To be looked at and found whole. Found alive. Please look at me. I promise you that I am here.

Perhaps I’ll kill myself and she can run the bakery, perhaps I’ll throw myself off the bridge or bake myself into a pie, what do you think? I said, in the same bright tone.

As I remember it, my skin turned to dough under his hands—rising, yielding.

I stood in the shop, full of desire sticky and red as berries boiled down in the pan,

When you came there was a clean break in your thoughts, a pure white zone of light, as if you had been beheaded.

I waited for my skin to fall from me in ribbons and for somebody else to be revealed, but there was only more pain, deeper but somehow even more unremarkable than before, and this time there was also grief that the pain revealed nothing to me, that perhaps there was nothing to be revealed at all.