The Breath of Bread
When Edward pushed open the heavy door of the flat block, he was met with the scent of damp plaster and something faint but warm—like a fresh loaf just pulled from the oven. Strange. This place had long forgotten the smells of life. Everything here had faded, hollowed out, as if time itself had abandoned these walls, leaving only the cold echo of footsteps.
He’d returned after eighteen years. The city had changed, become as foreign as he felt. His father had died in autumn. The funeral had passed quietly, almost unnoticed, the way they bury those the neighbours have already forgotten. The neighbour, Mrs. Margaret Whitmore, in her worn scarf and threadbare bag, handed him the keys.
“Let the son decide what’s next.”
He hesitated for months. It wasn’t about the flat—it was about something larger: memory, grief, the boy who once ran down these hallways believing everything would last forever.
Now he stood in the dim corridor where he’d once hidden from his sister during games of tag. On the old sideboard lay his mother’s sewing thread, a matchbox, a yellowed calendar, and a daisy-shaped hairpin. All untouched. Even the daisy. As if time had frozen, while he alone had aged, carrying not childhood joy but the dull weight of adult sorrow, heavy as wet snow.
The room smelled of the past—the scent soaked into the wallpaper, the curtains, the old throw on the settee, as though everything clung to the ghost of what once was. The air felt thick, almost solid, as if holding the breath of vanished years. He flicked the switch; the lamp buzzed reluctantly, casting a dim glow. Everything was the same, only dustier. The silence pressed in, loud enough to hear his own pulse, hammering out the words he’d never spoken.
He stepped into the kitchen. Clippings from old magazines hung on the wall: pie recipes, household tips, a prayer pinned with a rusted tack. Faded oven mitts dangled from a hook, waiting for a hand that wouldn’t return. On the windowsill, a pot of aloe clung stubbornly to life, a few green spikes defying time, like his father’s memory. The kettle sat on the hob, wrapped in an old tea towel, just as it had when his father left for work and his mother hummed under her breath. Edward filled it, sat at the table, stared out the window. In the flat across the way, someone smoked on the balcony, the cigarette’s glow blinking like a signal from another era. The world held its breath, as if before a storm, and only this room—drenched in memory—remained unchanged, an island in the fog of forgetting.
He found a box of photographs. There he was, a boy in a blue coat. His father, weary-smiled, hands rough with flour and tobacco. His mother—Edward lingered on her image, her eyes warm but sharp, crinkled at the corners. His father had left when Edward was nine. “Off to find work,” his mother had said. He never came back.
He slammed the box shut. Too much. Too fast.
The next morning, he met an old man in the courtyard. Hunched, in a flat cap, with grizzled brows. Something flickered in his face.
“You’re Michael’s lad?” the man asked, squinting.
“Yes. Edward.”
“Thought you’d never come back. Your father lived nearby. Over the river. Baker, he was. Made bread so good, folk came from miles for it. Broke, in the end. Fell off scaffolding in the nineties, they say. Hit his head. Lost his memory. Lived with a woman—she looked after him like a child.”
Edward went still.
“Where is he now?”
“Gone. Last winter. Alone. She said he sometimes remembered a boy. Called him Eddie. Dreamed of him. That you?”
The day blurred. Edward walked the riverbank, wind biting his face, his mind pounding: *Why?* Why hadn’t he come back? Why hadn’t he looked? Why leave him with this hollowness?
That evening, he ducked into a small bakery, the air thick with yeast and warm dough. The shopkeeper, an elderly woman with kind eyes, recognised him.
“You’re Michael’s son? He came here. Bought one loaf. Always just one. Left it on your windowsill. Said, ‘Let the boy remember how bread smells.’”
Edward stepped outside and wept. Silently, the way grown men cry when the past ambushes them like the scent of childhood baking. Tears traced his cheeks, catching fragments of memory—summer evenings, his father’s laughter, his mother’s warm hands, the smell of fresh bread from the kitchen.
On the third day, he cleaned the flat. Kept the things that held the house’s warmth: a cracked mug, an embroidered cushion, a shawl draped over a chair. Each object clung to its place, defying oblivion. He didn’t shut the door right away—pressed his forehead to the frame, saying goodbye not to the house, but to the part of himself where childhood still lived.
But every November, he would return. He knew that much. He’d come back to this quiet flat. Bake bread—plain, like his father’s. Leave a loaf on the sill. And walk away without looking back.
So that one day, someone might remember not the loneliness, but the warmth. So that this scent—familiar, alive—might bridge the gone and the living, the heart and the memory.
