The Scent of Bread
When John pushed open the heavy front door of the building, he was met with the damp scent of plaster and something faintly warm—like a loaf just pulled from the oven. Strange. This house had long forgotten the smells of life. Everything here had faded, grown still, as if time itself had abandoned these walls, leaving only the cold echo of footsteps.
He had returned after eighteen years. The town had changed, grown unfamiliar, just as he had. His father had died in autumn. The funeral had been quiet, almost unnoticed—the way people bury those whom life has erased from the neighbours’ memory. The elderly woman next door, Mary Stevens, in her worn shawl and tattered bag, had handed him the keys.
“Let the son decide what happens now,” she said.
He hesitated. For months. The decision felt larger than the flat—it was about memory, about pain, about the boy he once was, running through these hallways, believing everything would last forever.
Now he stood in the dim corridor where he had once hidden from his sister during games of tag. On the old side table lay his mother’s sewing thread, a box of matches, 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 a child’s joy but a grown man’s sorrow, heavy as wet snow.
The room smelled of the past. The scent clung to the wallpaper, the curtains, the old blanket on the sofa, as if everything here clutched at memories. The air was thick, almost tangible, holding the breath of long-gone years. He flicked the light switch—the bulb flickered reluctantly, casting a dim glow over the room. Everything just as it had been, only dustier. The silence was so deep he could hear his own heartbeat, a reminder of words never spoken.
He stepped into the kitchen. On the wall were clippings from old magazines—recipes for pies, housekeeping tips, a prayer pinned up with a rusted tack. Faded oven mitts hung from a hook, as if waiting for their mistress. On the windowsill, a pot of aloe clung stubbornly to life, a few resilient leaves stretching toward the light—like his father’s memory, refusing to fade. The kettle sat on the stove, wrapped in an old cloth, just as it had when his father left for work and his mother hummed softly to herself. John filled it with water, sat at the table, and stared out the window. Across the street, someone smoked on a balcony, the cigarette’s glow flickering like a signal from another time. The world felt still, as if bracing for a storm, and only this room, steeped in memory, remained unchanged—an island amidst oblivion.
He found a box of photographs. There he was—a boy in a blue coat. There was his father, tired-eyed, his hands calloused from flour and pipe tobacco. And there, his mother. John studied her picture: her eyes slightly narrowed, warm yet stern. His father had left when John was nine. “Gone to find work,” his mother had said. He never returned.
John snapped the box shut. Too painful. Too sudden.
The next morning, he met an old man in the courtyard. Hunched, in a worn-out cap and with bushy grey eyebrows, there was something familiar in his face.
“You’re Michael’s son?” the old man asked, squinting.
“Yes. John.”
“Thought you’d never come back. Your father wasn’t far. Lived across the river. A baker. Made bread so good people came from miles for it. Then he fell. In the nineties, they say—from scaffolding. Hit his head. Lost his memory. Lived with a woman—she looked after him like a child.”
John stood frozen.
“Where is he now?”
“Gone. Last winter. Alone. She said he sometimes remembered a boy. Called him John. Dreamed of him. Were you the one?”
The day passed in a blur. John walked along the riverbank, the wind biting his face, his mind pounding with questions: *Why?* Why hadn’t his father come back? Why hadn’t he searched? Why had he left him with this emptiness?
That evening, he stepped into the local bakery. Small, smelling of warm dough and yeast. The elderly shopkeeper, with kind eyes, recognised him.
“You’re Michael’s son? He used to come in here. Bought one loaf. Always just one. Left it on your windowsill. Said, ‘Let the lad remember what bread smells like.'”
John stepped outside and wept. Silently, the way grown men cry when the past catches them unawares—like the scent of bread from childhood. Tears streaked his cheeks, carrying fragments of memory: summer evenings, his father’s laugh, his mother’s warm hands, the smell of fresh baking from the kitchen.
On the third day, he cleared the flat. He kept what still held warmth: an old chipped mug, an embroidered cushion, a scarf draped over a chair. Each object clung to its place, resisting oblivion. He didn’t close the door right away—leaning his forehead against 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 this. He would come back to the quiet flat. Bake bread—simple, like his father once did. Leave a loaf on the windowsill. And walk away without looking back.
So that one day, someone might remember not loneliness—but warmth. So that this scent, familiar and alive, might be a bridge between the gone and the living, between heart and memory.
