White Bread

I used to read food magazines like they were pornography. I read each word like I was savouring a morsel of butter and brown sugar. I read the last few pages as slowly as possible already feeling the grey clouds looming, my sadness, at the magazine’s end.

Fifteen steps and a click: this was the warning that my father was coming downstairs, unlocking the basement door to put my food rations on a white chair outside my wood-framed, doorless…