#i don’t remember the layout to scully’s apartment so sue me

[softnow]

bread

msr | s? | gen | words: 600ish

i keep a notebook for writing practice and use a different word every day as a prompt. oct 4th’s word was “bread.” posted at the behest of @o6666666.

— — —

Her foyer smells like his platonic ideal of an autumnal childhood when he unlocks the door with his so-recently cut key. Warm, yes, and sweet, like a candle burning somewhere, one of the orange ones she bought at the farmer’s market last weekend as he trailed behind her, holding her canvas shopping bag of apples and dates, marveling.

There’s a crispness, too, in the temperature, but also in the smell. She must have a window open, though he can’t imagine why. It’s not quite sixty outside today, but the edge in the air is comforting despite itself, evoking dew-damp pickup games on the grade school playground, scratchy wool cardigans soaking up the scent of fog and sweat.

The image is so visceral he nearly forgets where he is, a near-forty-year-old man in his girlfriend’s apartment, a bottle of red in his hands and mud on his shoes.

He toes off the shoes and lines them up beside hers on the mat, and the sight of her dainty leather boots next to his old clodhoppers squeezes his heart.

He considers calling out to her to announce himself, then decides against it as the prospect of sneaking up being her, catching her unaware, and sinking his nose into the sweet curve of her neck where she dabs her expensive perfume, presents itself to him, and he moves lightly on stocking feet deeper into the apartment, chasing the nearness of her and that bittersweet nostalgic smell.

There’s something else to it now, tickling the inside of his nose, something that summons a harvest bonfire, piles of red and yellow leaves and the dry sticks they fell from providing the embers over which to heat flagons of cider and sticky, puffed marshmallows. Does she have a fire going in the hearth? Just the candles? But neither option feels quite right, the acridness more elemental, more wild.

And then he is greeted with the final piece of the puzzle, so nearly lost under everything else, a Thanksgiving yeastiness, the close, warm smell of the insides of tea towel-covered bowls, the smell of white dusted handprints on an apron, the smell rarest of all in his boyhood memories.

He rounds the kitchen at last, and there she is, not in an apron but in flour-covered sweatpants and an academy t-shirt, two orange pumpkin candles ablaze on the stove, a window open, a 9 volt battery on the sill, clearly recently plucked from the smoke detector dangling corpse-like from the ceiling, and there, flanked on either side by oven mitts, a blackened lump in a loaf pan.

She turns before he can surprise her, before he can make it to the sugared crevice between her ear and shoulder, and she is flushed and chagrined and beautiful.

“Martha Stewart makes it look easier,” she says.

“Ah,” he says, reeling her in by the waist, noting the flour in her hair like streaks of grey, and he sees her in thirty years, just as radiant, just as inept in the kitchen, and his stomach does a yo-yo at the prospect—the very likely prospect, or at least, more likely than he ever could have believed—of being there to see it. “But Martha Stewart never looked so good covered in baking powder.”

And he kisses her, and she tastes as sweet as a brown sugar donut, as new as October’s first sunrise, as familiar as the New England chill. She tastes like fall. Like falling, every day, still.