Crazy The Old Bakery

Hot Cross Buns! Hot Cross Buns!
One a penny,
Two a penny,
Hot Cross Buns!
If you have no daughters,
Pray give them to your sons!
One a penny,
Two a penny,
Hot Cross Buns!

--old English rhyme

It is the third hour of the day, that period when night is thickest and begins to wane, when dawn is off and far beneath the horizon.

Three o'clock in the morning, called the midnight of the soul, the doors behind the bakery at the end of Main Street are thrown wide and gingerly for the kitchen is so hot.

A dulcet cloud rolls out into that shiversome and chilly hour, giving wing to sugar and honey and cinnamon.

Buns are made here.  Doughnuts.  Cookies.  Perhaps a cake or two.  Here in the lonely hours of the sleeping world, hands do their work.  Everywhere at this hour, the time has come for dark labor, done outside of the light of God's day.

Surely not here.  This is a bastion of cheer and joy.  In this squat brownstone building, buttery, honeyed things are created, coated with the white, crystal of sugar.

Joy one can actually hold; in the hand, the nose, the mouth.

Strange noises in there.  Strange sights, things best left unseen.  Unheard.

Hours pass and many weird hands (too many by far!) work the pastry, the ovens.  They bake.  The workers are the exiles of daylight.  What will they put in their small delights?

Here, a large book stands open on a counter.  A recipe book.  An odd book. 

Very, very old-looking.  Ancient even.  The leather binding is so very peculiar!

There, a robust spice rack hangs.  Cinnamon, present!  Nutmeg, of course! 

Cocoa, check!  Ginger, indeed!  Black Nightshade, yes!  King's Dreames, yes!  Baluus's Quick, oh yes!

These and others are shaken from fine bone shakers (did you say bone?), and decanted from vessels (never silver, never silver) into and onto this biscuit.  That roll.

Soon dawn gallops over the horizon and in his wake comes the bleary-eyed and shuffling-gated denizens of the day.  Puffy-cheeked and smelling of soap, they march in.  The fat counterman greets them with a wide smile, friendly eyes and a friendlier word or two.  No one ever sees the pastry makers.  Not ever.

Mrs. Carmody takes her coffee with heavy cream and heavy sugar.  And she leaves with two cinnamon buns wrapped in crisp, white paper and twine.  She will have eaten both before she arrives at the post office.  As she licks the saccharine goop from her bony fingers, she will wish (not for the first time!) that her fat, lying, cheating, drunk husband would make it easy and just leave her.

Later that day Mr. Carmody will be sawn in two at the mill (good!), and Mrs. Carmody will receive a million dollar insurance payout (better!).  She will also be stricken permanently blind (Best!).

Mr. Rohrer also takes his coffee with cream and sugar.  How he loves the apple fritters.  As he burns his lips on the coffee, he wishes his boss, a handsome guy ten years younger, would just fuck something up.  Not have everything go his goddamned way, for once.

Later, Mr. Rohrer will learn that his handsome boss has fired him from the plant for smoking pot on the job.  Mr. Rohrer will go out to his car, retrieve his .38, walk back into the plant and gun down his handsome boss (not anymore), twelve other employees (assholes, every one) before finally painting the walls of the smelly employee bathroom with his own brains (never liked the prison-green paint job in there anyway).

Officer Brady takes his coffee black.  And of course he takes a dozen doughnuts into the station.

There is a riot at the station that afternoon (look ma!  We're even on CNN!).  Only Officer Brady survives, but he never actually got to have one of the doughnuts from the dozen that he was so kind as to purchase.  Of course, why would he?  He had spit on every single one of them.  Brady receives a medal from the mayor.

Mrs.  Levinson doesn't like coffee and opts for the tea instead.  And a couple of glazed crullers.  Her son is homosexual and thinks she doesn't know.  She wishes he would not be attracted to men anymore, as she shovels the pillowy pastry into her maw.

Later that day her only son's neck is broken by the captain of the football team (who also happened to be the first person Bobby Levinson ever slept with).  He will be a vegetable for life.  He is no longer attracted to men. 

Or girls for that matter.  Mrs. Levinson goes hopelessly insane from grief.

Now the sun is long, long set and from the bakery at the end of Main Street there comes the busy din of sweet things being made by twisted, weird hands.

Delicious aromas drift out into the three o'clock hour.

David Reames was a research biologist at a large Cancer research center in Detroit, MI. He recently moved from Detroit to New York City for a slower-paced life style in which to finish his first novel.

Email: David Reames

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