Mum no longer needed to get up early in the cold mornings to ensure that all the bread would still be hot in customers' hands. She just added more spirit in kneading the dough into the shapes of bread; her look was as serious as a sculptor carves his works. Occasionally, she would tell me who the dough men actually were after she finished shaping. Those dough, rough and uneven, reminded her how her personality was like, and how those cracks hurt herself and the others. She missed them so much. After all, they were the closest people to her. However, unlike before, the oven made me feel that she already kneaded those little dough men into one big messy dough arbitrarily. Soon, the dough would expand slowly and became extremely plump, fully baked, cooled downing. Then we could eat them up and digest them completely. In many nights, we looked forward to being awaken from our dreams by the aroma of fresh bread. Therefore, I believed that she actually felt incomparably happy in those afternoons that she was enjoying those strange shaped bread with a cup of green tea.

 

Surely my sister did not think so. She thought that those salty and greasy bread worsened mum’s hypertension and gradually made her nutrition unbalanced.

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I thought mum did not feel loathing for being restricted to eat a limited amount of bread by my sister. She truly felt hurt when my sister put the blame on the breads which she regarded as her children. She said with clenched teeth that it was a revenge. It was because several years ago my sister bit a rotten tooth inside the bread she was eating. It turned out to be the one mum dropped into the dough carelessly when kneading it.

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On the day that my sister decided not to eat at home anymore, we met at a cafe. She ordered an exquisite chestnut cake, but had no desire of eating it. She just held forth about mum. Years of bitterness and resentment all poured out of her. “This is why she got dumped. If I were her husband, I would definitely not tolerate her too,” said my sister, turning her head away, watching out of the window, as expressionless as the flow of passers-by.

About that time, my bread-making gene started to rise up. It was not an impulse. It was not expectancy or excitement. It was only a responsibility, or an obligation. After all, bacteria inside the yeasts kept dividing, and became bigger with the increased temperature and amount of water. They finally became a grey cloud that was thick enough to cover us all. It even covered our nose, mouth, eyes and skin pores. If we didn’t turn them into loaves of bread, they will become much more terrifying than an out-of-control car.

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Therefore, I was not shocked about mum’s quiet disappearance. But to my surprise, she left with that old heavy oven. In all these years, my sister went back home for the first time. Standing before mum’s messy bed, she found the house so unfamiliar and not recognizable. As if it were not mum who had disappeared, but her past self.

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“Where did she go?” My sister suddenly turned around and asked me.

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I shook my head and answered, “Somewhere her bread is accepted.”

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Both of us were speechless. When the aroma of the bread wafted from the new oven and filled up the whole house, a sense of grease and dampness surrounded us. Then, I took out a whole tray of golden colour bread from the oven.

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Just like when we were little, my sister and I stood before the window to gaze upon the street. We still tore the bread into pieces and ate them all. The only difference was that we were not young anymore. The bread, rough and tasteless, reminded me of mum’s face, of our sagging skin.

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As the wind blew, leaves and branches were waving. It fluttered the passers’ clothes, ruffled their hair and slack muscles, and whipped the rubbish at the centre of the street. The whole world seemed to have titled a little bit.