The red season was burning down to a black coal fast: the bell mushrooms shriveled from fat brown fists to varicose nets that hissed peppery spores, the hearth-lichen’s coat worn threadbare and stinging, the quagga beginning to shed their summer vegetarianism. Their roving orange eyes wheeled towards the children playing bread and stones, the icicles of hunger spelling out a sharp logic. And we whisked the children back into the tents, and begged the matroness again to please cast the oracles so we could leave.
Bread, the matroness croaked, and we stole the white pebbles the children played with as they shrieked in protest, their mouths open like small birds. Breaaaad, the matroness said.
God, we loved her then.
We rocked her like a child as the screaming washed up against the tent. Each night, the stitched canvas felt thinner and thinner; soon, we knew, it would be as ghost-skin between the night and the organs of the dead. The children still played, if uneasily, their natural immunity against the knowledge of human death waning as the nights grew longer. The adults passed a fermenting question alongside the greasy stew bowls each night, frothing bitterer on each ask: Was it time now? Did we unbury the canisters of soft bright carrots and dark speckled grass, hold the matroness down and make the god-cuts, repeat the ceremony?
We were scared, the cowards and heretics among us, those who keep a god-struck name underneath our tongues. Our eyes urged caution as our teeth rasped against antler scraps and boiled tendon. We still remembered Shani’s choosing: her apple cheeks withering overnight with the deep knowledge, her red hair slithering away like scalded snakes as the god-wire pushed through. Our children were still our children, still soft from the oven, and we would keep them that way, we decided as we swallowed the dull charcoal feeling. If we could find the matroness’ impossible mythic lure, she would settle.
The quagga champed at the edge of the valley; Erl told us all how he had seen them watching the children through the morning mists. We could feel our teeth pressed into something rubbery, something that would break soon.
Bread: the matronesss had sung to us of its thick golden shell. An inverse egg, all white in the center. If it grew anywhere, it would be in one of the gray palaces.
Three of us left the morning a quagga stepped over the lip of the valley, after we helped Erl kill it. The meat was gray, slimy, anonymous. None of us joked that the matroness would taste better; the knowledge just steamed between us.
Snow was landing when we left, covering pits of freezing snakes and old thresh-traps. We lost Nital early, in a red spray as his left leg disappeared. A thresh-trap, gleaming screaming teeth washed bright silver by the meal we prized out of it. The soup was rich and tainted with the memory of Anja’s wet hair in the summer moonlight. I am surprised Nital never told her, but we dried a bit for Anja anyways; it rattled in a leather pouch at my waist like the matroness’ oracle bones.
The second day we found the gray palace. Animals picked superstitiously around its buzzing walls and winking eyes. We did too, remembering the matroness’ rambling warnings. A green eye welcomes, a red eye burns.
Chani found the door carved above the mouth of a stream, the green eye blinking over it, and we slipped inside.
It was like the matroness prophesied, the smell of bread. The rich sifting scent of it like hot sand tempered with gold egg yolk. We knew because we must, because we had to: bread was the purview of this gray palace. Other palaces wove tight spirals of metal or shrieking glass cubes, but this palace birthed moon-shaped rolls.
Beneath the bright smell, something cracked. Something musty and dark.
When we found the door with the red eye, we knew why. We could see the crouching immortal through the window shaped like a bread-roll, metal bars latticing it.
Have you ever seen an immortal? Its set tracks, its silver arms whirling through ancient, indecipherable prayers? They cannot be stopped, cannot be prayed to: not gods, but the gods’ abandoned obsessions. When we found the immortal praying in front of the door, when we saw the mountain of mold-eaten bread behind it, we knew that trying to save the matroness was always useless. That the palace still waited for its dead king.
Chani opened the door anyway. She and Shani were sisters once, after all. I held my breath and wondered which part of her I would dry, which parts of her I would eat. What secrets I would learn from them.
There was a loud whir, and an explosion, and Chani touched the blood oozing from a cut under her eye. RECOGNIZED, the immortal said in its immortal language. GENETIC TRACES OF THE PRIMARY STAKEHOLDER, DORMANT FORM.
The door inched open, and we stared at each other, both thinking the same thing: the immortal had set us some test. That if we darted forward to the moving black fabric bouncing fresh, golden rolls off the cragged mountain of shaggy mold, one of us would explode.
But it’s been hours, and these idiots are stuffed with enough bread that I have almost taken the I from them both. Paul said that nano-laced bread was a war crime, a fiend’s immortality, but I bet the workers abandoned his factory the second their collars deactivated. Let his brain rot in a jar. They’ve let this world become plagued with forests and religion, for God’s sake. I roll my new shoulders, crack my new necks. I will bring the tribe a basket of sweet rolls, cure the dementia of my other self, start kneading the world afresh with divine industry. I have waited so long. After all, I am the living bread, and whoever eats me will live forever.
BREAD OF LIFE is the winner of the Apparition Literary Magazine October Flash Fiction Challenge.
