Mum enjoyed making bread so much. Her body seemed to be occupied by another person which made us think that we may not need to act as who we are in our daily life. Anyone could leave their house at any time anyway. Every night after dinner, she took the yeast out of the refrigerator to get it to room temperature and touched its stiff body with her gentle whisper which seemed like encouragement but near pouring out. She only poured water on it at midnight as if planting a queer plant. Then, she added flour and knead it again like doing massage to soothe someone’s muscle pain. She made a new dough, just like God made Adam to his look, the dough had mum’s reflection.

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It was inexorable. Sometimes, she screamed, cursed and cried while pounding the dough. Sometimes, she pulled and tore the dough, then thrown it to different corners of the kitchen. Of course, most of the time, she was just continuously kneading the shape of that sticky stuff in her hands and expressing her own secret feelings.

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We pretended to be asleep, but there were a lot of things that we could not control in our life, for example we could not close our ears. It made us understand that no one could keep out of it.

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Later on, mum announced to us during dinner that she wanted to turn it into a mass production. “Different types of bread have different emotions, just like a kind of strong hormone which could attract the same kind of people from other places. It is hard for the passer-by to resist” I could see happiness twinkling in her eyes, but could it really stimulate people’s appetite? I was not quite sure.

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“The bread sold on the market is scientifically fermented. It is like eating a bunch of cotton candy when you bite it. Either all sticking between your teeth, or just like the emptiness of losing everything. Only naturally fermented bread would fill up that chilly hole and the feeling of hunger. Same as the nature of planting a tree, at last it bears fruit,” she said, tearing up a bit of the brown rice bread with her protruded canine again.

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My sister and I did not say a word, with our mouths full of breadcrumbs and chips. I did not know whether the reason we remain silent was the same or not, but after that day, she stopped come home to dine with us as often. She was already a college student, get rid of her uniform, and wearing on her own outfits. If she did not have to discuss group projects on that day, then she might have to attend a faculty meeting. Sometimes it was doing part-time tutoring, or date, or celebrating a friend’s birthday, and she was exempt from cleaning up those unsold bread made by mum. I could not stop thinking why am I not the one who goes in the university? Why couldn’t I make up an excuse to go out for dinner? Maybe I was wasting too much time searching for the unknown and the emptiness in my soul, like a hard and endless wall or a blind man exploring a giant elephant with his hands. I finally got nothing Perhaps I could not step over the line perhaps if the feeling of hunger in the body could not been cured, I could not step over the line that we didn’t know who set it up. Every time when I sneaked out to have a meal on a whim, I came up with an unfamiliar chef whose fingers studded with black scales, or greasy hair. Just as when I imagined that I will take a car to the city centre, I thought of there is no one I liked and full of meaningless faces.

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That night, my sister came home after mum had fallen asleep. Therefore, she could keep on staring at the hard and dried bread which couldn’t be sold and was left to deteriorate. After a while, she walked in front of me and lowered her voice, revealing her dissatisfaction, “Everyone knows that people actually like the flavours of red bean, sesame, cheese, corn, taro, tomato, vanilla, green tea, or pumpkin."

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Although we had the same view, I did not go along with her. But I knew, when I awoke from my dream again, a piece of mum’s hand-made bread would still be the food I eat after fasting for a whole night.

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My sister moved her belongings bit by bit from home to elsewhere, just like insects storing food for winter, industriously but keeping low profile. At the same time, she also kept this as unobtrusive as the way mum ended her bakery business.