Breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs.

by

Sidney Vollmer.

It were the crusts of the bread that were the first telltale something was wrong in the village. Though the baker had used the same flour, the same salt, the same butter for decades, the loafs were singed. Blackened. The baker had not seen that happen since he was a little kid and his mother let him bake his first raspberry pie: putting the oven on too high a temperature had not only destroyed the pie, it had sedated his ambition to bake bread until his adolescence. Eventually though, he repainted his father’s bakery shop and baked breads, pastries, cakes and pies for over  three decades. All was fine. And now this happened.

The baker took the singed bread to his wife, who had just woken up and was reading the morning newspaper in their kitchen. He hadn’t changed the temperature of the oven or the time, he said softly. He had done the same thing today he’d been doing since, well, forever. ‘That doesn’t mean it’s not your fault,’ his wife remarked. The wife, a punctual and zealous cleaner of the luxurious villas in their town, didn’t bother with understanding why the bread was charred, nor why it was so upsetting to her husband. She wanted him to provide money so she could buy food, cleaning supplies and the the occasional magazine. And that was that.

Determined his little bakery shop wouldn’t disappoint the customers of his village again- let alone his wife- he closed the bakery for the day to find out what went wrong. He checked the power supply, the pipes, the water, the air vents. He lifted and wiped the racks from his oven. He wiped the bottom grid clean of its grains, its traces of flour. He brushed out the sunflower seeds, the sesame seeds and the tiny breadcrumbs that had accumulated over the years. Cleaning this avidly, the baker understood the passion of his wife a little better. This felt good.

When everything was cleaned, he took out salt, yeast and flour from the stockroom, poured lukewarm water in a measuring cup- he wanted to be precise- and set everything on his sink. To find out how much yeast he needed for just two loafs of bread instead of for a whole batch, he took out his old, withered cookbook, divided the numbers and wrote everything down on an empty bag of flour. He mixed the exact amount of ingredients and let the yeast bloom for precisely ten minutes. Since starting up his  kneadingmachine would take up too much time- closing the bakery for a day was troubling enough as it was- he kneaded by hand. He folded the dough, flattened it, folded it again, pressed, turned and folded it some more. He felt the dough push through his fingers, the slow, comforting sense of something real under the palms of his hands. He had not felt this in a very long time. Maybe it had been the kneading machine, the man thought, he remembered it was up for a revision. He felt happy, sure to learn what caused his crusts to char.

After the dough was done, he went to the kitchen, picked up a newspaper and let the dough rise while reading the newspaper. He read news he already knew, news he had heard from his television the night before. Flipping the pages, he checked his watch constantly and after exactly thirty minutes took out one of his cleaned breadshapes, brushed it with a little butter, pushed half the dough in and cut the top of the dough three times to give it enough space to rise. Confidently, he put the bread on a fresh grid in his preheated oven. He sat down on a chair in front of the oven, wiped a few tiny drops of sweat from his brow  and watched his bread being born. It was just as he was sitting down he realized what was going wrong. He smiled.

The man held his wristwatch to his ear. It ticked as regularly as the heartbeat of a sleeping man. He stood up, walked to his industrial oven and tapped the digital clock. The little dots between the digits were appearing and disappearing, second after second. But the oven was three minutes ahead. It’s only a small difference, he thought, but it was probably the reason why this happened. He reset the numbers on the oven to match the hands of his watch. Maybe there had been a power shortage last night, the man thought. This would have caused the oven to char his loafs. Both his watch and the clock of the oven were now set to exactly a quarter past ten. If he would just keep an eye on the hands of his clock, all would be fine.

The man sat down again, rubbed some dough from his nails. Since he still had about  forty-five minutes left, he decided to do some more cleaning. He grabbed a broom. He cleaned. After thirty-nine minutes, his wife barged in. ‘They had no right! They had no right!’ she screamed.

‘What’s the matter,’ the man asked.

‘They fired me! The mister and his missus at Richwood Lane!’

It never rains but it pours, he thought bitterly. ‘Why?’ he asked.

His wife brushed her short brown hair from her face. ‘They said I was late! Absolute, utter nonsense! I am never late. Never.’ she replied angrily.

Since she was the only person more punctual than him, the man was about to agree. Remembering what had happened earlier, he asked to see her watch. ‘Why,’ she asked, ‘don’t you believe me, silly old bugger?’ She took off her watch and handed it over. 10.49, it said. He looked at his own watch and looked at the oven. He frowned. His watch said 11.05. The oven said 10.47- did it fall behind already? By the oven’s time, the bread had been in the oven for thirty two minutes. He looked at his own watch, calculated. The bread had been in the oven for fifty minutes. Ignoring his wife’s fierce comments, he gazed through the glass door of the oven. The bread was as burned as if it’d been baking for hours on end.

Still ignoring his wife, the man went to the small computer on the attic they barely used and checked the time. 11:32.

Something was wrong.

‘How about a shoulder to cry on? Selfish man!’ his wife screamed downstairs.

The man felt sorry for her. He really did. But he needed to check the other clocks in the house first. For what is a baker without his baking time? He went to the bedroom. 11:41, the alarm clock said. ‘I’ll be damned,’ the man whispered, ‘I’ll be damned.’

What the man didn’t know was that in seven minutes time his wife would have a heart attack, fall down at the bottom of the stairs and die. In eight minutes, he would find her and become so utterly frightened by the sight he will  run up the stairs, call his neighbor Phillip and hide in a corner until Phillip would show up.

The sight of his wife will frighten him. Her hair will have grown past her shoulders, white as flour. Her face will be as wrinkled as the newspapers she read each morning. Her clothes will have become as thin as the pages of a bible. He will hardly recognize her.

That’s eight minutes in the future. Right now, the man checks the aluminum clock in their bathroom. 10.29, it says. For reasons unknown to him, he has an erection. That’s something he had not had since, well, forever.