Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

When I recall the first time I met Violet, it embarrasses me.

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.

You would never willingly come somewhere like this, which perhaps is why I feel safe here.

I won’t talk, because the only real truth I could tell them is that sometimes there is a switch, and the world is turned upside down.

and they reminded me of my own family, whom I never thought of if I could help it. This filled me with both sentimentality and unease, set my heart’s scene, because sometimes we return to what we recognize, whether we want it or not.

I thought to myself how the worst I had done really was not any of the little betrayals but in murdering my marriage with familiarity, and it was unfair because that is only what marriage demands, the careful establishing of familiarity in order to be able to live your life the next day and the next and the next.

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.

Transformation is a membrane-fragile magic, easily disturbed by a breath.

That’s what you do with a daughter, especially a bad one, and they’re all bad ones, stricken with their own loveliness, stricken with their own doom.

How trite it was, in the end, you playing at transcendence like it would save you from the little domesticities of your lot, the things you felt beneath you, the things that were only for women like me. Water and soap and flour, sweat-marked linen and butter and lye and buttons and thread—how could they possibly compete with the life you had imagined for yourself, up there in the mountains?

picture you sometimes as a set of Russian dolls, each layer revealing nothing except a tiny, weaker version of yourself, at the end only hollowness.

Sometimes the process of being in the world feels easy, sometimes it does not.

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.

You can witness the unthinkable, you can have the unthinkable done to you, and at some indeterminate point in the future you can still be happy, even if just for a fixed moment, a little ball of satisfaction in the chest—isn’t that incredible? Even blood washes out, or you can fill your mouth with things that hide the taste of it.

No number of their secrets, no amount of accumulated power, would make me one of them; and yet I could not leave, either.

I can’t tell if we are at the point where a good love turns bad, if we already passed it, or if it is up ahead for them still at this point. I don’t know really where love begins, though I’ve been trying to pin it down, and I know even less where it ends.

But it might be that you need people less after that, knowing what they’re capable of.

One man couldn’t do this to a whole town. But a woman like you, with your long dark hair, and the marks on your arms and ankles.

What did you see there, waiting for you in the water? Perhaps the river would boil, perhaps you would shrink into a bird and fly away, perhaps you were as curious as anyone to know what would come next. Perhaps it was a relief. The mystery of the world laid out for you in vivid colour, one last time.

None of the stories ever mentioned me.

The truth is that I’ve seen behind the curtain too, I realize now I saw behind it long before they arrived, and the possibility of transformation, that destruction which can feel a lot like peace when it comes, was in me all along.