The bakery opened in the narrow storefront that had once housed a shoe repair shop, and within a month people were lining up before sunrise. The attraction was supposedly the dough, although everyone knew the real reason.
The woman behind the counter could bend pretzels into shapes that seemed unwilling to remain in three dimensions. Some had five or six interlocking crossings. Others looped through themselves in ways that made the eye lose track of which strand passed over and which passed under. They emerged from the oven golden, glossy, and structurally impossible.
Regular customers developed theories. A pretzel with two tight inner loops supposedly helped with indecision. A broad knot with one open side was said to bring someone back into your life. Nobody agreed on what the shapes meant, though people came in carrying breakups, job offers, illnesses, court dates, and private hopes as if the bakery had become an unofficial clinic. The woman never confirmed anything. She simply chose from the trays and watched each customer take the first bite.
I started going twice a week and soon found reasons to go daily. Simpler shapes produced easy days. Complicated knots seemed to entangle everything around me. Meetings shifted times without anyone admitting they had been changed. Conversations repeated with slightly altered wording.
Once, after eating a pretzel twisted through itself nine times, I arrived home to discover I had already been there for several hours. My coat was on the hook and the kettle was warm, though I remembered walking directly from work.
Eventually she began reserving one for me each morning. My initial appeared on the paper in flour even though I had never told her my name. The shapes grew increasingly dense. One contained a center knot so tight the dough had split and fused again while baking. That day I felt a steady pulling sensation behind my ribs, accompanied by memories of decisions I was certain I had never made.
This morning the paper held a smooth, unbroken loop. No crossings. No visible beginning. The woman watched me turn it in my hands and asked whether I had been sleeping better. I said I had, though lately my dreams had become repetitive: the same apartment, the same morning, the same walk to the bakery, with tiny details changing each time.
She seemed relieved. She explained that most people arrived knotted by accident and spent years tightening themselves through habit. Some eventually needed loosening. Others had become too complicated to undo safely, so the best she could offer was a cleaner arrangement.
When I asked what kind mine was, she glanced toward the ovens, where several identical loops were browning on the middle rack. I noticed then that each paper sleeve beside them carried my initial, and that through the bakery window the street outside appeared to curve gently in both directions until its far ends met behind me.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
Leave a Reply