Devaki Devay
Honey
I’m new to town. There aren’t many people I know, so there aren’t many people I talk to. Today I had a little conversation with the bus driver. He asked me where I was headed -- I said 57th street. I’m relishing that conversation in my mouth like hard candy, although it’s been under my teeth so long that I’ve given in, and bitten it in half. Now the two cracked pieces are lolling around my tongue like a broken heart. How silly.
Silly, isn’t it, to swing through a set of doors on a whim? I want sweets so badly, more than anything, so much so I took the wrong way home without even realizing, and ended up, as luck would have it, at a bakery lined with pastries.
Pastries glisten with sweet summer peaches in their centers, outlined by golden frills, fig jam and clotted honey. Behind the glass a girl with golden hair stands, bent down at her phone. She is having a fight with her boyfriend. I didn’t know this, but she looks the way I look when having a fight with my boyfriend. Absorbed, serious, folded into herself. I say good afternoon as lightly as I can, fishing for her eyes.
Eyes greet me in a state of shock, and the phone flips over on the counter. She welcomes me, swirling behind the glass, hazel eyes and golden hair, the colors of bakery settling on her body. I want to speak to her because I feel bad about the fight which I am not sure she is having.
Having caught her attention, I stoop into the glass and ask, which one’s your favorite? I have taken her edge like a piece of origami paper and pulled, perhaps eliciting an unraveling. Now she will emerge from the waters. She thinks and points at the raspberry layers in cloudy cream, dusted with snow, and says this one. I play along and order her suggestions, linking myself like an anchor at sea.
Sea blue light filters through the windows from the summer sky. It is calm enough to speak, I think. So I ask her how long she’s worked here. I’m a fellow worker, the question reveals. Your labor is not invisible to me. She smiles and says yes, I have worked here for a year. I ask if she likes it.
It’s sad, she says. I have a budding gluten intolerance now, I didn’t have one before. So I can’t eat as much of the bread.
We are both getting old, I think, both slipping slowly into another age of our bodies, running into bouquets of new intolerances and ache. I tell her I have one too, a new one, too, to remind her she is not getting old on her own, as I had once believed myself to be. I feel this is an intimate detail: our shared increased flatulence, our bloated bellies.
Bellies of bread balloon patiently in the orange heat of the glowing stove. I see them through the glass, their egg whites still glistening, not yet hardened into crust. At least you can still eat sweets, I begin to say, but the lady has already begun folding.
Folding the box of my order, her eyes are once again hidden away, hair draped over her neck. In the breakage, I look at myself in the glass and realize our distance with a start. I am mismatched: hairy legs, a wide belt, short hair, coupled with soft brown skin and a high voice. God is still stirring me, attempting to dissolve the parts -- that is how I look. Nothing betrays my true completeness, I think. My graceful age.
Ages pass as the receipt curls from the machine. I am a customer again, nothing more. There is a new moment of memory to relish, not quite as sweet.
Sweet blossoms curl in the springtime air. Sometimes, they drop in my hair, curls of petals crowning my head. This beckons the bees toward me, who regard my neck a stem and my face a flower in bloom. They pick me apart till all I am is honey.
Silly, isn’t it, to swing through a set of doors on a whim? I want sweets so badly, more than anything, so much so I took the wrong way home without even realizing, and ended up, as luck would have it, at a bakery lined with pastries.
Pastries glisten with sweet summer peaches in their centers, outlined by golden frills, fig jam and clotted honey. Behind the glass a girl with golden hair stands, bent down at her phone. She is having a fight with her boyfriend. I didn’t know this, but she looks the way I look when having a fight with my boyfriend. Absorbed, serious, folded into herself. I say good afternoon as lightly as I can, fishing for her eyes.
Eyes greet me in a state of shock, and the phone flips over on the counter. She welcomes me, swirling behind the glass, hazel eyes and golden hair, the colors of bakery settling on her body. I want to speak to her because I feel bad about the fight which I am not sure she is having.
Having caught her attention, I stoop into the glass and ask, which one’s your favorite? I have taken her edge like a piece of origami paper and pulled, perhaps eliciting an unraveling. Now she will emerge from the waters. She thinks and points at the raspberry layers in cloudy cream, dusted with snow, and says this one. I play along and order her suggestions, linking myself like an anchor at sea.
Sea blue light filters through the windows from the summer sky. It is calm enough to speak, I think. So I ask her how long she’s worked here. I’m a fellow worker, the question reveals. Your labor is not invisible to me. She smiles and says yes, I have worked here for a year. I ask if she likes it.
It’s sad, she says. I have a budding gluten intolerance now, I didn’t have one before. So I can’t eat as much of the bread.
We are both getting old, I think, both slipping slowly into another age of our bodies, running into bouquets of new intolerances and ache. I tell her I have one too, a new one, too, to remind her she is not getting old on her own, as I had once believed myself to be. I feel this is an intimate detail: our shared increased flatulence, our bloated bellies.
Bellies of bread balloon patiently in the orange heat of the glowing stove. I see them through the glass, their egg whites still glistening, not yet hardened into crust. At least you can still eat sweets, I begin to say, but the lady has already begun folding.
Folding the box of my order, her eyes are once again hidden away, hair draped over her neck. In the breakage, I look at myself in the glass and realize our distance with a start. I am mismatched: hairy legs, a wide belt, short hair, coupled with soft brown skin and a high voice. God is still stirring me, attempting to dissolve the parts -- that is how I look. Nothing betrays my true completeness, I think. My graceful age.
Ages pass as the receipt curls from the machine. I am a customer again, nothing more. There is a new moment of memory to relish, not quite as sweet.
Sweet blossoms curl in the springtime air. Sometimes, they drop in my hair, curls of petals crowning my head. This beckons the bees toward me, who regard my neck a stem and my face a flower in bloom. They pick me apart till all I am is honey.
Devaki Devay is a South Asian writer of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Find their work in Okay Donkey and Barren Magazine, and follow them @DevakiDevay.