Skylight Bread

At four-thirty, Elena slid back the iron gate and felt the chill of the courtyard reach her cheeks. The city’s windows were mostly dark, a few pale rectangles floating in the gray. Her key turned in the bakery door with a sound she liked, a little click and the soft sigh of wood. The place smelled of yesterday’s flour and a trace of cinnamon. Overhead, the old skylight showed a square of cloud the color of unbaked dough.

She set her backpack on the counter and pulled on her apron. The fabric was stiff with years of washing. The mixer hummed while she measured water in a dented steel pitcher. She wet her hands and reached into the bowl, fingers sinking into the cool softness. The first fold always calmed her. Air moved through cracks in the window frame, a lace of cold against her wrist.

“Morning, little sun,” she told the jar on the shelf. The starter puffed bubbles at the surface, a quiet living thing in the warmest corner. She fed it and smiled at the smell—tart apples and something like memory. When she lifted the lid, a drop landed on her knuckle. She looked up. A bead of water had gathered under the skylight’s wooden bar. It trembled like a tiny pearl and fell. A second drop chased it, patting into the empty proofing basket she’d set aside last night.

Elena dragged a pan under the drip and rolled her shoulders. The skylight had leaked for years, just enough to nudge her into these small dances. She had promised herself to call a roofer in the spring. Spring kept filling with orders and deliveries, then with tired evenings when she stood too long on a chair and didn’t like what she saw on the roof. The frame up there was older than she was.

She kneaded until the dough felt like a creature about to breathe. The courtyard woke in slow layers. A bicycle bell, a sparrow in the rain gutter, the rumble of the first bus. Samir across the alley dragged up his coffee shutter; the metal sounded like summer thunder. He waved and mouthed, “You open?”

“In an hour,” she mouthed back. He lifted a bag of oranges as if to promise something. The little bell on her own door tumbled once; perhaps the building was shifting with the warming day. She wiped her hands and saw the white envelope under the doormat, tucked so neatly that she would have missed it if the mat hadn’t slid.

She bent to pick it up. The envelope was stiff, the kind that belongs to offices. There was a city seal printed like a watermark. Somewhere in her chest a string pulled tight. She set the envelope on the flour-dusty counter and covered it with a kitchen towel as if it were dough that needed to rest.

The timer chimed. She dusted the baskets, shaped the first loaf, slid the round onto linen. It rose into a plump pillow under her palms. Her hands memorized the motion. “Don’t think ahead,” she told herself. “Think about the seam.” The skylight sent down a square of cold light that tracked across the counter as dawn thickened, and she kept her breath even, following the light’s slow walk with dough and cloth and iron pans.