The Loaf

Photo by Nicholas Barbaros on Unsplash

The loaf presented itself one ordinary Thursday morning. It was baking in the oven when I woke. Only a handful of seconds left on the timer as I peeked through the golden window to glimpse its proportions, perfect in every way.

I cooled it on a baking rack, already laid out on the counter, sliced two pieces and, as they steamed, covered them with thick strokes of cold, fresh butter. I took them upstairs to the bedroom where my son slept and roused him. We ate the bread together in bed, silently. As we chewed, I noted a faint handprint of flour ghosted on his pillow, which indeed was peculiar, yet somehow also seemed quite reasonable to me.

Had I been a better mother, I might have sprinted through the house, searching for the intruder who had made the bread, who had left behind the ghostly handprint. I might have sampled the bread before giving it to my son, to ensure it wasn’t poisoned or otherwise unsafe to eat. But, because I am drawn to whimsy, because I had become irrationally enamored in the presence of things like “perfection” and “beauty,” I assumed the loaf to be only and purely “good,” in the most essential and basic way, and, as such, did not panic or doubt its intentions for even a moment.

I did not tell my husband, after he arrived home the next day, of the peculiar arrival of the loaf. I only told him that I had started baking, that I had been compelled to do so out of some primal and unstoppable urge. He was used to this sort of thing and, I imagine, happy to see my urges put to productive use. I had made a dozen loaves in that one day between the loaf’s first arrival and my husband’s return home. None of them were as perfect at that first, though.

They sat all in a row on the table when he arrived home, but I told him I wasn’t satisfied with their presentation and planned to move them to the top of the piano, to juxtapose their practical, nourishing materiality with the piano’s silence, but we both agreed this seemed too conceptual and, moreover, that it was an idea not yet fully formed or thought through—that the loaves on the piano did not yet, put simply, mean enough—so I left them on the table for another night. I needed time to think.

The boy wanted to eat the loaves, but I reminded him we were still working on the first loaf, the original loaf, that there was plenty left from that loaf to eat, to not touch the twelve loaves.

If you don’t touch the loaves, I told him, in the morning, there might be a miracle. Both he and I did not know what this meant, though I didn’t reveal to him my lack of understanding. I spoke with certainty, as if I grasped the mysteries of, if not the universe, at the very least, bread.

In the morning, a miracle had indeed been visited upon the loaves, and instead of twelve loaves, the entire first floor of our home was covered with a layer of loaves: the floor, the tables and chairs, the counters, the piano, the mantle above the fireplace, the end tables, the coffee table. You get the picture.

Wow, my son said.

My husband was less impressed.

Look at all this goddamn bread, he said. And what happened to your hair?

Yes, my hair did seem to be entirely floured, dusted a pale white,house my son called it—constructed of the loaves. As I explained to my son, birds would land on the house made of loaves and nibble away until the house became a misshapen, makeshift approximation of its former self.