Yellow and the Long Yeasty Wait

Every evening the yellow raincoat hung by the back door on its brass hook, sleeves a little crumpled, hood tipped forward like it was dozing. It had been rained on, puddle-splashed, and once left out overnight under a whole thunderstorm, and it had opinions about all of it. Tonight it was not raining at all. The sky outside the window was a deep, unbothered blue, and the raincoat found this almost unbearably dull.

I do not see, said the raincoat to the door hinge, who I am even for, on a night like this.

The door hinge did not answer, because door hinges rarely do, but the wind found the gap under the door and answered instead, curling in smelling of warm bark and something sweeter — cinnamon, maybe, or the ghost of it. The raincoat's hood lifted, just slightly, the way a nose lifts when it catches a good smell three streets early.

That's Osswyn's bread, the raincoat thought. I'd know that smell hanging upside down in a hailstorm.

It so happened that the hollow-tree bakery was having a strange night of its own. Osswyn stood at the great round oven built into the trunk's belly, silver eyebrows drawn down in concentration, and would not admit — not to the dough, not to the fire, not even to herself — that something had gone wrong with the evening loaf. It had risen too fast, then sunk, then risen again in a lopsided way, like it couldn't decide what season it wanted to taste of. Summer bread should be light as a held breath. This one sat heavy and strange under its cloth, sulking.

"You," Osswyn said to the loaf, not unkindly, "are being difficult."

The loaf, being a loaf, said nothing back, but a little puff of flour dust drifted up from Osswyn's apron as she wiped her floury hands on it, and for a moment she looked less like a badger who ran a bakery and more like someone standing at the edge of a puzzle she didn't have the words for. She had never been much good at explaining what a loaf needed. She simply knew it, the way you know which way is down, and when the knowing failed her she went quiet and worked harder instead.

Outside, the raincoat had made a decision, which was unusual, because raincoats mostly wait to be worn rather than deciding things themselves. But the hook was old and slightly loose, and the raincoat had been wriggling its shoulders against it for months the way you wriggle a tooth that's nearly ready to come out. Tonight, with the smell of trouble-bread drifting through the crack under the door, it wriggled harder than it ever had, and the hook let go with a small tired creak, and the raincoat slid down and landed in a cheerful yellow heap on the mat.

Well, it thought, brushing itself off with sleeves that didn't quite have hands to brush with. That's that, then.

It went out the flap in the door meant for a cat that had never existed, which was a tight squeeze and cost it a small tear along one seam it would feel every rainy day from now on, and flump-flumped its way down the garden path on empty sleeves, hood bouncing, toward the smell of the hollow tree.

Osswyn, meanwhile, had begun kneading a second loaf from scratch, because that was what you did when the first one wouldn't behave — you didn't shout at it, you didn't leave it, you just began again with clean hands and more patience than you thought you owned. Her floury hands pressed and folded, pressed and folded, and she hummed something low and wordless, a tune with no beginning that she'd been humming, on and off, for as long as the child had known her.

It was in the middle of this humming that the door of the hollow tree creaked open on its own, letting in a draft, and a small yellow shape flumped over the threshold and stopped, suddenly shy, in a puddle of oven-light.

"Well now," said Osswyn, not stopping her kneading, though her eyebrows rose considerably. "A raincoat. Out on a dry night. That's either very brave or very lost."

I am not lost, thought the raincoat firmly, though it wasn't sure this was true, and it also wasn't sure Osswyn could hear thoughts, so it settled for flopping one sleeve in what it hoped looked like a wave.

"Come to see about the difficult loaf, have you," Osswyn said, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. "Everyone's a critic tonight." She said it lightly, but there was a tiredness underneath it, the kind that comes from trying and trying to get a thing right and not knowing quite which word would fix it, because for Osswyn there had never been a word for it. There was only ever the dough.

The raincoat flumped closer and did the only thing it knew how to do, which was open itself up, hood and all, and lay itself across the top of the sulking first loaf like a blanket, the way it had once been laid across a cold windowsill plant, or draped over a shivering somebody who'd forgotten an umbrella. It didn't know if bread got cold. It only knew that things left alone too long sometimes needed covering, and that this was a kind of help it was built for.

Osswyn stopped kneading. She looked at the yellow coat spread gently over the stubborn loaf, sleeves tucked in like it was tucking the bread into bed, and something in her chest loosened that she couldn't have named even if you'd asked her three times. She didn't say thank you, because Osswyn rarely found the words for the big things. Instead she reached over, lifted the corner of the coat, checked the loaf beneath — and found it had, in the last few quiet minutes, begun to breathe again, rising slow and even, finding its shape at last.

"Would you look at that," she said softly, and there was a whole conversation folded into those five words.

She left the raincoat where it was, warming the loaf while the second one rose beside it, and the two of them sat together in the tree's hollow glow — one covered in a coat that had never worn itself for anyone before, one still learning to say things out loud instead of just doing them — while outside the dry summer night went on not raining at all, and neither of them minded one bit.

In the morning the loaf came out lopsided but good, striped pale and dark like it had rained and shone in the same hour, and Osswyn wrapped a slice in cloth and tucked it, without a word, into the raincoat's damp front pocket, right beside the little tear in its seam, for it to carry home like a badge.