I was burned out. Not “I need a vacation” burned out. I mean googling monasteries at 3 a.m. with a bottle of wine in my lap burned out.
So I decide: I need something real. Something physical. Something with a yeast-based worldview.
I sign up for a trial shift at a bakery.
I walk in. The manager hands me a clipboard and says, “You’ll be shadowing Dough Carl.”
I say, “Is that a nickname?”
She says, “That’s what’s left of him.”
Carl enters.
He doesn’t walk. He emerges. Like a sourdough starter that became sentient and legally changed its name to Carl.
He’s wearing an apron that looks like it survived a fire in a haunted Victorian doll factory. His beard has layers. His eyes have seen things. Things baked at 475° for 32 minutes.
He looks me up and down like a disappointed ghost and says:
“The dough remembers.”
This is minute one.
Then he picks up a hunk of dough, cradles it like a wounded soldier, and says, “It’s scared. It doesn’t know you yet.”
Sir, I barely know me.
Every moment with Carl is a test I didn’t study for. He talks like a cursed scroll. Every sentence feels like it should end with thunder.
“You don’t shape the loaf. The loaf shapes you.”
“There’s no such thing as underproofed. Only emotionally premature.”
He points at the sourdough starter — this jar of bubbling beige sludge — and says, “That’s Harold. Harold the Eternal.”
I ask if it’s named after someone.
He says, *“It named itself.”
Now I’m in a bakery treating a jar like it’s a f***ing demigod. We don’t feed Harold. We offer.
At one point, I reached for the rye flour too early and Carl just whispered:
“Not yet. The rye’s still grieving.”
We haven’t baked a single loaf. We’ve done three meditations and a circle of forgiveness around the bannetons.
Carl leads us in a chant:
“Fold the pain. Shape the shame. Praise the proof.”
A woman passes out. Carl says, “Good. She’s close.”
At some point, I mis-scored a loaf. Carl gasped like I slapped his child. He picks it up, holds it to his chest like it’s dying, and says:
“It’s okay. You didn’t know. You still have… time.”
Then he makes me apologize to the oven.
And I do it.
Because by then I am no longer sure I exist outside of this bakery.
The climax — the moment everything snaps — is when Carl unveils The Loaf.
He opens the oven like it’s a tomb. Pulls out a perfect, golden, glistening loaf and says:
“This one… forgave me.”
I don’t know what he did. I don’t know what it forgave. But I start crying. Full tears. Loud. Ugly. On the floor.
Carl just places a single calloused hand on my shoulder and whispers:
“There is no bread without death.”
And I believe him.
I quit before my shift ended. I left my apron, my dignity, and what I can only describe as my pre-bakery personality.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Because now, sometimes — late at night — I hear a sound coming from my kitchen.
A low, slow crackling.
Like something… rising.
I walk in.
The oven light is on.
The starter jar is open.
And carved into the countertop, in perfectly even lines…
…is a proofing schedule I never wrote.