The Scent of Bread
When Edward pushed open the heavy front door of the building, the smell of damp plaster and something faintly warm greeted him—like a loaf of bread just pulled from the oven. Strange. This house had long forgotten the scent of life. Everything here had faded, grown lifeless, as if time itself had abandoned these walls, leaving only the cold echo of footsteps.
He’d returned after eighteen years. The city had changed, grown foreign to him, just as he’d grown foreign to it. His father had died in the autumn. The funeral had been quiet, almost unnoticed, like those of people whom life had erased from neighbours’ memories. Mrs. Higgins, the elderly woman next door in her worn-out scarf and faded handbag, had handed him the keys.
“Let the son decide what’s to be done,” she’d said.
He hesitated. For months. The decision felt larger than just the flat—it was about memory, about pain, about the boy who’d once darted through these corridors, believing everything would last forever.
Now he stood in the dim hallway where he’d once hidden from his sister during games of tag. On the old sideboard lay his mother’s sewing threads, a matchbox, a yellowed calendar, and a daisy-shaped hairpin. Everything in its place—even the daisy. As if time had frozen, while he had aged, carrying not childhood joy but grown-up sorrow, heavy as wet snow.
The room smelled of the past. The scent had seeped into the wallpaper, the curtains, the old throw blanket on the sofa—everything clinging to memories. The air was thick, almost tangible, as if holding the breath of vanished years. He flicked the light switch, and the bulb buzzed reluctantly before casting a dim glow. It was all just as he remembered, only dustier. And the silence—so deep he could hear his own pulse, a reminder of words left unspoken.
He moved to the kitchen. On the wall were clippings from old magazines: recipes for pies, housekeeping tips, a prayer pinned with a rusty tack. Faded oven mitts hung from a hook, as though awaiting their mistress. On the windowsill, a pot of aloe clung stubbornly to life, its few leaves like memories of his father. The kettle sat on the stove, wrapped in an old rag, just as it had when his father left for work and his mother hummed softly. Edward filled it with water, sat at the table, and stared out the window. Across the street, someone smoked on a balcony, the cigarette’s ember flickering like a signal from the past. The world held its breath, and only this room, steeped in memory, remained unchanged—an island in the void.
He found the box of photographs. There he was—a boy in a blue coat. There, his father, with tired eyes and work-worn hands that smelled of flour and tobacco. And his mother. Edward studied the photo for a long time, her eyes warm but stern. His father had left when Edward was nine. “For work,” his mother had said. He never came back.
Edward shut the box. Too painful. Too sudden.
The next morning, he met an old man in the courtyard. Hunched, in a worn flat cap and with grey eyebrows, there was something familiar in his face.
“You’re Michael’s boy, ain’t ya?” the man asked, squinting.
“Yes. Edward.”
“Thought you’d never come back. Your dad lived nearby. Over the river. A baker—bread so good folk came from miles for it. Then he broke. Sometime in the nineties—fell off scaff’lding. Hit his head. Lost his memory. Lived with a woman who looked after ’im, like he were a child.”
Edward froze. “Where is he now?”
“Gone. Last winter. Alone. She said he sometimes remembered a boy. Called ’im Eddie. Dreamed of ’im. That you?”
The day passed in a haze. Edward walked along the riverbank, wind biting his face, his mind pounding with one question: Why? Why hadn’t his father returned? Why hadn’t he looked for him? Why had he left him with this emptiness?
That evening, he stepped into a local bakery. Small, warm, with the scent of dough and yeast. The woman behind the counter, kind-eyed and grey-haired, recognised him.
“You’re Michael’s lad, aren’t you? He used to come here. Bought a loaf—just one. Always left it on your windowsill. Said, ‘Let the boy remember the smell of bread.'”
Edward stepped outside and wept. Silently, the way adults cry when the past catches them unawares, like the sudden scent of childhood bread. Tears streaked his cheeks, and in them flickered fragments—summer evenings, his father’s laughter, his mother’s warm hands, the smell of baking from the kitchen.
On the third day, he cleared the flat. Kept only the things that held warmth—the old cracked mug, the embroidered cushion, the shawl draped over a chair. Each object clung to its place, resisting oblivion. He didn’t close the door right away—pressed his forehead to the frame, saying goodbye not to the house, but to the part of himself where childhood still lived.
But every November, he would return. He knew it. He’d step back into this quiet flat, bake bread—plain, like his father’s—place the loaf on the windowsill, and walk away without looking back.
So that one day, someone might remember not loneliness, but warmth. So that this scent—familiar, alive—could be a bridge between the gone and the living, between the heart and memory.