The Baker’s Creation
By Ally Mauser
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Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved
Smashwords Edition
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Bread dough is alive. It is warm and grows up with the yeast inside of it. Glenda Goodman, of Salem, Massachusetts, felt closer to a farmer than a pastry chef when she kneaded the dough and brought the grains to life. Pastry was inert. Bread, like good soil with rich compost, was alive and would grow and grow. She used a stone oven, filled with coals. It was big enough to roast a whole pig inside of it. She flipped loaves in and out of the heat, scraped the coals from one side to another to try and keep the heat even, and sold her loaves for a shilling each to the locals. Without a husband, many of the men were wary to shop from her, but many of their wives showed mercy and no one complained about the quality of her bread.
Still, a husband would be nice. Glenda was still young enough to marry again. She was still beautiful, beneath her bonnet. She had long, black hair, and dark eyes. She knew her body was supple and strong, with firm breasts as full and ripe as her best loaves. Her skin was smooth and unblemished. She had read enough of the Good Book to know that men would love this flesh, if they even glimpsed it.
An unmarried man was hard to find in Salem. Sailors, perhaps, would shuffle in and off the boats, eager to bed down with her, but this was not good enough. They would leave with the boats, probably never return if they were able. They were unreliable men, not god-fearing Puritans. Other setllers came, but they were weak from months on the boats, and many did not survive their first winter in the New World. And, with such newcomers, the tight-knit community was loathe to open their arms to outsiders so soon after the Witch Trials that had done so much damage to these outlying farms and simplefolk. If she married some man from a boat, it would only be because he wanted to belong in the village, and not because he loved her. Then, it would not be long before her thriving business was his, and no one would even think to credit her with the loaves that were so beloved in the village. To marry a man was to grant him ownership over her, and her bakery.