- Polite Fictions

Charlie squeezes the dough between her fingers, watches it ooze between her knuckles, pushes it neatly back in a mound, then tugs and squeezes, on and on, a meditation. She is surrounded by flour and yeast. The place stinks of pink sugar and birth, heaven and earth, and it is the only place she feels completely comfortable.

She works alone in the dark and she’ll be home before daylight. Her very best manifests as everyone sleeps: later, she might dance on the hood of a car (like her mother) or sing with the band, but here, right now, she can dig her fingers in and be sinister. Before the oven takes over to crack and harden her braids and skinny perfect baguettes, she silently, selfishly wields salt and poppy seed at her masterly whim. She is beholden to nothing, but for temperature and chemistry.

He is unmanageable but he is brilliant, she thinks, wiping off flour this morning like every morning, a routine, on her jeans and then slides hot loaves under glass. He never laughs at her jokes; he just grimaces. He beckons her to come down from bar stages and kitchen counters because he wants to talk to her alone in a stairwell. Outside. Away. Are you ashamed of me?

No, he says.

She needs him to come closer, needs to touch him and watch him rise and settle in her hands. His skin goosebumps his grateful thank you but his mouth voices his rejection. There is no part of his skin that is wanting enough for her.

Fuck him, she thinks, as she high-fives Dodi, the owner and the opener, who hands her a cig and wheezes, Thanks, bitch. Charlie unfurls her hood, covers her head, flips the sign from Closed to Open, lights the butt and walks out into the dawn with regret about that letter.

Christ, is how she started it, I had no idea you mattered that much.