Story time.
Since my dorm job is to make some type of bread for sixty people every Wednesday at midnight, near the end of the quarter I have little energy or inspiration with which to come up with something inventively tasty. So my strategy for last night's bread was something comepletely conceptual:
Ironic bread.
But how to make bread ironic? Well, I asked some friends but they hadn't a clue. But then I realized: simply spend the least amount of effort making the bread actually good and instead spend the vast majority of my time justifying the bread's existence through a massive contrived backstory. And so. I wrote. This is the email I sent to the dorm list to announce that my bread was ready:
The cunt was lying. The chilly spark in her eyes betrayed her. Gasping, the grey wench offered it again. “I loved you like me own lad…as I promised yer mother. And God in ‘is ‘eavenly Grace…” she broke into shivers and hacks again. Those lying eyes reminded me of the day my life broke into thousands of pieces, meaningless pieces, like the dead starchy lumps I’d dig out of the sodden earth every day with my brother. We’d tear at the sooty dirt for hours in the yellow-green fields and collect the potatoes in a burlap satchel my da’ had given us, and after a trek to the market we’d ferry back one or two punts, with a sugar crumb or two for the each’e us. That was in…must’ve been ’11 or ’12. Then we heard the McMurtry’s ‘round past Perry Avenue were sick, and soon word spread of the sicklung…or as Father Kinley called it, consumption. A wave had just hit the south Irish coast and for weeks we’d totter about with rags about our faces, unaware, playing games of cat and mouse and drawing smudged whiskers on our masks, ripped from cloth Ma could just barely afford us.
Then one day, da’ just didn’t go to work, and Ma went in and out of his room with the face she made when we lost little Abigail back to Heaven. It wasn’t long before we were prodded into the bedroom by Father Kinley to wish da’ off ta Heaven to be with The Lord and All His Saintly Stewards. And ma’ said she’d never leave us. But I could see the lie in her eyes. The same eyes. She was dead before the November snow.
Dead to leave me with savage Aunt Larabee, who lay here before me, her hand outstretched, offering me her vile hand, the hand that beat me ‘till my rear was raw, who dunked me in ice to rid me of Satan himself, the hand that reached in me drawers to scratch like an animal at my thing when I told her about Sally Mefanwie and the outhouse.
Her hand opened, and in it lay a crumpled piece of cheap linen stationary. She was trying to buy her way out of Lucifer’s ever-kindling fires. I averted her desperate eyes, and opened it slowly. The words were a frantic blur, scrawled in her gnarled cursive. At the very top were three desolate words.
Irish. Soda. Bread.
Ironic bread.
But how to make bread ironic? Well, I asked some friends but they hadn't a clue. But then I realized: simply spend the least amount of effort making the bread actually good and instead spend the vast majority of my time justifying the bread's existence through a massive contrived backstory. And so. I wrote. This is the email I sent to the dorm list to announce that my bread was ready:
The cunt was lying. The chilly spark in her eyes betrayed her. Gasping, the grey wench offered it again. “I loved you like me own lad…as I promised yer mother. And God in ‘is ‘eavenly Grace…” she broke into shivers and hacks again. Those lying eyes reminded me of the day my life broke into thousands of pieces, meaningless pieces, like the dead starchy lumps I’d dig out of the sodden earth every day with my brother. We’d tear at the sooty dirt for hours in the yellow-green fields and collect the potatoes in a burlap satchel my da’ had given us, and after a trek to the market we’d ferry back one or two punts, with a sugar crumb or two for the each’e us. That was in…must’ve been ’11 or ’12. Then we heard the McMurtry’s ‘round past Perry Avenue were sick, and soon word spread of the sicklung…or as Father Kinley called it, consumption. A wave had just hit the south Irish coast and for weeks we’d totter about with rags about our faces, unaware, playing games of cat and mouse and drawing smudged whiskers on our masks, ripped from cloth Ma could just barely afford us.
Then one day, da’ just didn’t go to work, and Ma went in and out of his room with the face she made when we lost little Abigail back to Heaven. It wasn’t long before we were prodded into the bedroom by Father Kinley to wish da’ off ta Heaven to be with The Lord and All His Saintly Stewards. And ma’ said she’d never leave us. But I could see the lie in her eyes. The same eyes. She was dead before the November snow.
Dead to leave me with savage Aunt Larabee, who lay here before me, her hand outstretched, offering me her vile hand, the hand that beat me ‘till my rear was raw, who dunked me in ice to rid me of Satan himself, the hand that reached in me drawers to scratch like an animal at my thing when I told her about Sally Mefanwie and the outhouse.
Her hand opened, and in it lay a crumpled piece of cheap linen stationary. She was trying to buy her way out of Lucifer’s ever-kindling fires. I averted her desperate eyes, and opened it slowly. The words were a frantic blur, scrawled in her gnarled cursive. At the very top were three desolate words.
Irish. Soda. Bread.