Biological Destinies

The countenance is distorted beneath the shimmering light as I rise to the surface to see a woman suddenly there, cooing at the piercing cries that fill the bathroom before covering my eyes with cotton darkness.

There he is with a hoe in the middle of summer, scraping the tufts of grass that bear down the fence. There he is with a spatula burning the eggs as I wince at acrid smell that fills the room. More and more, I hear his voice over the line cracking before a sob, before the confession that he misses me and prays for me every night.

I sink into a chair and explain to the scrawny owl-eyed lady in glasses how I want to be completely different from them, how I hate the machismo. “Tell me something you do admire about your brother and father,” her finger pushing up her wire-rimmed glasses. “…I think my dad is diligent…dedicated and honorable-” but the slight hesitation reveals the distrust, perhaps apprehension.

“I’ve been working on it for a while,” he tells me in his jean jacket, expansive because of his broad shoulders, and slowly he unveils the small batch of golden dough. “See the yeast; it smells so good when it starts fizzing. Just makes me want to drink!” I can hear the drunken hollers of an early Thursday night through the open window, but here I am baking brioche as if I owned a boulangerie on a Paris corner that the residents depended on, not necessarily for baguettes but rather for the whiff of bread they relish on their way to work. I can barely hear the clinking bottles so close through the window; I only feel the warmth of the oven flushing my face.