The Butter Incident
Disclaimer: I fell asleep after a bakery shift and dreamed this. That is the only explanation I can give. Make of it what you want.
Credits to: my fucked up brain when I finally try to sleep a reasonable amount of hours
The bakery stood at the edge of the square like it had been placed there by mistake. Everything around it was grey, practical, and tired: the concrete apartment blocks, the chipped curbs, the strip of patchy grass along the walkway, the benches nobody used unless they were too old to care where they sat. The buildings had the same washed-out expression as people waiting in a doctor’s office. Rows of windows, rows of balconies, laundry stiff in the damp morning air. No sun ever seemed to reach that part of town. Even when the clouds thinned, the light stayed flat and colourless, as if the sky had lost interest halfway through becoming morning.
Inside the bakery, everything was warmer. Not cheerful, exactly, but warmer. The glass counters glowed yellow. The bread shelves lined the wall behind us in rows that looked calmer than any of us felt. Rolls in baskets, seeded loaves, dark bread, pale bread, pastries dusted with sugar, croissants stacked in a way that always looked more effortless than it was. The coffee machine hissed and clicked with the importance of a small factory. The ovens breathed heat into the back room. The floor tiles had the faint permanent stickiness of a place where dough, sugar, butter, spilled coffee and shoe soles had formed an unholy alliance long ago.
It was an ordinary bakery. That was the worst part, later.
I worked there with Alice and Frank.
Alice was young, younger than she looked when she stood still and older than she sounded when she got bored. She wore black almost every day, black jeans, black shirt, black boots, sometimes a chain on her belt that caught the light when she moved. Her hair was black too, straight and heavy around a pale face. Her eyes were blue in the way winter windows are blue, clear enough that people probably mistook them for softness before she opened her mouth. Her lipstick was dark, sometimes black, sometimes the colour of bruised plums. She had the style of a girl who had once listened to Evanescence and never fully escaped the architecture of that feeling.
Frank looked like a man who had been rained on for fifty years while being consumed by bittersweet alcohol. He was not old, but he had that worn-down quality some men carry as if they were born already halfway through a bad week. His clothes never sat right. His hair never looked clean even when it was. His face was lined and exhausted and somehow always a little amused by things that were not funny. He smelled faintly of tobacco, cold sweat, and the back room. When he moved fast, which was rare, it looked accidental.
They were not friends. Not exactly.
They were something else.
They found each other irritating with the kind of precision that only certain people manage. Alice would be leaning against the counter, rolling a strand of black hair around her finger, and Frank would be arranging trays behind her with slow, deliberate movements. Neither would look at the other until the argument had already begun.
“It goes in the freezer,” Alice said one morning.
Frank did not turn around. “No, it doesn’t.”
“It lasts longer.”
“It gets hard.”
“That’s the point of a freezer.”
“It’s butter.”
“I know what it is.”
“You don’t treat butter like bread.”
“You don’t treat butter like a spoiled house cat either.”
I was counting change for an old man who had bought two rolls and paid with coins so slowly it felt like a ritual. He watched my hands instead of looking at the display. Behind me, the argument continued.
“The fridge is full,” Alice said.
“Then make space.”
“With what hands? Yours are right there.”
Frank opened the fridge, stared into it, shut it again and said, “It’s not full.”
Alice smiled at the back of his head. “You didn’t look.”
“I looked.”
“You opened it. Different thing.”
The old man cleared his throat. I gave him his change. He did not thank me.
That was how the days went. Customers, coffee, rolls, receipts, trays, and somewhere in the background Alice and Frank arguing about butter. It happened often enough that after a while the argument became part of the bakery’s soundscape, like the coffee grinder or the bell over the door. If they had ever stopped, I might have noticed the silence.
Sometimes Alice talked about sex while slicing bread.
Not flirtatiously. Not shyly. She spoke about it the way other people discuss rent or weather or how long to bake something without burning it. Detached, curious, faintly bored.
“You think people exaggerate it?” she asked Frank once, while wiping crumbs from the counter with a blue cloth.
“What?”
“Sex.”
Frank was kneeling near the lower shelf, restocking wrapped sandwiches. “People exaggerate everything.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer you’re getting.”
She leaned on the counter and looked down at him. “You’ve done it.”
He snorted. “What do you want, a certificate?”
“I want to know if people lie because it’s good or because they want it to be good.”
Frank shoved the sandwiches into place. “Both.”
Alice considered that as if it were useful. “That’s disappointing.”
“Most things are.”
“That one shouldn’t be.”
“Then don’t ask people.”
She laughed once, short and sharp, and returned to the bread slicer. I remember that because a customer looked up at her laugh as if someone had dropped a knife.
The bakery had its regulars. Every bakery does. The woman who bought the same pastry every Wednesday and pretended she was trying something new. The man who asked whether the rolls were fresh even if he arrived before sunrise and watched us take them from the oven. The mother who let her little girl press sticky fingers against the glass.
A boy that was strange. Not in a way anyone would report. Just strange enough that the memory of him remained after the day had ended.
He appeared more than once. Small, pale, serious. He never seemed to arrive with anyone, but nobody ever asked. Once he stood by the counter and stared at the wrapped butter portions stacked for breakfast service.
“Does butter remember being milk?” he asked.
I thought he was joking. He did not smile.
“No,” I said, because what else do you say to that at seven in the morning?
He looked at the butter for a while longer. “Then why does it melt?”
Alice, who had been wiping the display glass, stopped for half a second. Frank glanced over from the coffee machine. Nobody answered.
The child left without buying anything.
Another day there were rats in one of the apartment blocks. I know that because an old woman came into the bakery furious and shaking, saying she had seen them in the stairwell. Frank told her she should tell the landlord. She said the landlord was useless. Alice asked whether the rats were big. The woman said yes, huge. Alice said rats were never as big as people claimed. The woman called her a rude little thing and bought a loaf of rye bread anyway.
The town kept moving in that dull way towns do when nobody is happy enough to notice they are alive. People came down from the concrete blocks in slippers and jackets, bought bread, complained about prices, looked through us, went back upstairs. The sky remained grey. The bell over the bakery door rang and rang and rang.
Then Luke appeared.
I had known Luke before. Not well, not badly, just enough that he belonged to that category of person your memory keeps in a clean drawer. Former neighbour. Tall. Nearly two meters. Handsome in an ordinary, useful way, not polished, not dramatic. Kind hands. Nice lips. The kind of calm friendliness that makes you trust someone before you have a reason. He had tutored me in math once, years ago. He was a volunteer firefighter.
He came in during a slow hour, when the bakery felt abandoned even though the town was awake. He bought something simple. I do not remember what. A roll, maybe. Something that required no conversation.
I smiled at him more than I needed to.
Alice noticed immediately.
She was behind me, tying off a bag of pastries. The plastic crinkled between her fingers.
“Is that your lover boy?” she asked after he left.
“No.”
“You smiled.”
“I smile at customers.”
“Not like that.”
Frank, who was counting coins badly, lifted his head. “Who?”
“Nobody,” I said.
Alice leaned one hip against the counter and watched Luke through the window until he disappeared past the grey apartment blocks. “He looked back.”
“He didn’t.”
“He did.”
“He probably looked at the door.”
“Sure.”
I hated that she noticed. Not because there was anything to notice, but because once Alice saw something, she held it in her hand too long. I tried to shift the attention back to her, asked her something stupid, something I do not remember now. It worked, or maybe she let it work. Frank made a sound that might have been a laugh.
The conversation should have ended there, but it didn't.
Most conversations in the bakery never really ended. They just drifted into other subjects and forgot where they had started.
A customer came in for three rolls and left with four because Frank counted wrong. Somewhere in the back a timer rang. Nobody moved.
Outside, the apartment blocks sat under the same colourless sky they had been sitting under all week by the time we closed up for the day.
Alice was sitting on the low concrete wall behind the bakery, picking at the label on a bottle she had found somewhere.
Frank was smoking.
I was mostly listening.
"...that's why people cheat," Alice said.
Frank looked at her.
"You always talk about that stuff."
"What stuff?"
"People."
Alice shrugged.
"They're interesting."
Frank laughed.
"No, they're not."
"They are."
"No."
Alice picked at the label again.
"Most people marry the wrong person."
"You've never even had a boyfriend."
"So?"
Frank stared at her.
"Wait."
Alice looked up.
"What?"
"You've never had a boyfriend."
"No."
"And you're still talking like this."
Alice shrugged.
Frank narrowed his eyes.
"You're a virgin."
It wasn't really a question.
"Yes."
The answer didn't seem to bother her.
Frank looked away.
For a moment I thought he was going to say something else.
Instead he flicked the cigarette into the gravel.
"You're weird."
Alice smiled slightly.
"I know."
Nobody spoke for a while after that.
Days passed after that. Or maybe they only felt like days. The bakery continued. The butter argument continued. The strange child came and went. Frank and Alice continued circling each other through ordinary tasks: wiping tables, restocking bread, arguing over the fridge, moving around each other in the narrow back room without ever touching.
On the last day, the bakery was full before it should have been.
It felt like a Sunday. That specific kind of Sunday where people arrive in clusters, impatient from church or family or habit, pretending they are relaxed while demanding everything at once. The line reached the door. Somebody wanted twelve rolls. Somebody wanted sliced bread. Somebody wanted coffee. Somebody wanted cake packed separately because the icing might touch the cardboard. Somebody asked a question and answered it themselves. Somebody changed their mind after I had already wrapped the order. The bell over the door rang so often it became meaningless.
My little brothers were there too, waiting for me. They had settled near one of the tables with the resigned expression of children who know the adult in charge is working and therefore not really theirs until the shift ends. I kept checking them between customers. They were fine. They were always fine until they suddenly weren’t, and that thought sat in the back of my head while I worked.
Behind me, Alice opened the fridge.
Frank said, “Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re moving it.”
“I’m checking it.”
“It’s butter.”
“I know it’s butter, Frank.”
“You don’t put it there.”
“Then where, your pocket?”
I turned to ask the next customer what they wanted. A woman in a beige coat leaned forward as if the counter separated her from rescue.
“Is anyone serving here?” she asked, although I was standing directly in front of her.
“Yes,” I said. “What can I get you?”
Behind me, the fridge door shut too hard.
The woman wanted bread, then not that bread, then the other one, then half, then sliced, then no, not too thin. While the machine screamed through the loaf, Alice said something I missed. Frank answered with a curse. The coffee machine hissed. My brother knocked his heel against the chair leg three times. Somebody’s phone rang.
Then Alice cut herself.
I did not see how.
One second she was arguing.
The next she was looking at her hand.
A thin red line opened across her palm, then widened. Blood collected in the crease before spilling toward her wrist.
Frank stared at it.
Alice stared at it too.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then the woman in the beige coat said, “Excuse me, I’m still waiting.”
That was the moment. Not the cut. Not the blood. That sentence.
Frank turned his head toward the customer very slowly.
“What?” he said.
The woman stiffened. “I said I’m waiting.”
“You can see she’s bleeding.”
“I can also see my bread sitting there.”
Alice laughed.
Frank looked at her.
The laugh was not loud. It was not even especially strange. But it changed his face.
He moved before I understood he had decided to.
He struck Alice hard enough that she hit the edge of the counter. The sound was dull and wrong. The customers went silent for one impossible second, and then the bakery broke open.
Alice came back at him with the bread knife.
Not screaming.
Not crying.
Smiling.
Somebody shouted. A phone hit the floor. The woman in the beige coat backed into the display and knocked over a tray of pastries. I dropped the bread bag. Frank caught Alice by the wrist and slammed her hand into the counter. The knife clattered. She kicked him in the knee and he cursed so violently that one of the children at the tables began crying.
I went around the counter.
I don’t know why.
I knew better even then. Somewhere in me I knew not to go between them. But another part of me, the trained big sister part, the stupid responsible part, saw two coworkers fighting in a bakery full of customers and thought: stop it.
“Enough,” I said.
Nobody heard me.
I grabbed Frank’s sleeve. Alice’s elbow hit my chest. Frank shoved her. She stumbled into me. I pushed her back, tried to put distance between them, tried to make my voice sharp enough to become authority.
“Stop.”
Alice looked at me as if she had forgotten I had a face.
Then Frank lunged again.
Everything after that happened too quickly and too slowly.
Alice was on the floor.
Then she was not.
Frank had blood on his cheek.
Then he had more.
The customers were no longer customers. They were a wall of open mouths and phones and bodies trying to leave through the same door. Someone screamed for the police. Someone screamed my name, maybe one of my brothers, maybe not. The bell over the door rang and rang and rang as people fled.
I tried to get away.
Frank caught me first.
Then I noticed Alice.
She was standing a few steps away, staring at me.
Or so I thought.
It took me a second to realize she wasn't looking at my face.
She was looking lower.
Following her gaze, I finally looked down.
The yellow handle was already there.
The yellow knife came from somewhere near the prep station. I recognized it because I had used the same knives for work, ordinary knives with yellow handles, the kind you use because they are there.
Sticking out of my stomach.
For some reason, that shocked me more than being stabbed.
I had been so busy trying to understand everything else that I hadn't really understood what had happened to me.
Alice tilted her head slightly.
Not worried.
Not horrified.
Observing.
As though she had just noticed something interesting.
Frank followed her gaze.
Then he looked back at me.
And smiled.
Not a wide smile.
Not a theatrical one.
A small smile.
The kind people use when they finally find something they've been looking for.
My stomach tightened.
Not because of the knife.
Because of him.
Because suddenly several strange things about Frank made sense all at once.
The way he looked at things.
The way he talked about food.
The way he watched people when he thought nobody noticed.
The realization arrived quietly.
And once it arrived, it refused to leave.
Frank leaned down.
There was no dramatic pause. No speech. No warning.
His hand was close to my body. The yellow handle stuck out from between us. For a second I thought he had missed because it did not feel real enough. Then the pain arrived behind the shock, huge and bright and nauseating, and my knees gave way.
I hit the floor behind the counter. The tiles were cold through my clothes. My hands found blood before they found balance. I tried to breathe and could not get enough air. The bakery sounded far away and underwater, but the details sharpened cruelly: sugar on the floor, a shoe print in spilled coffee, a dropped receipt curling at the edge, the smell of warm bread still moving through the room as if nothing had changed.
Frank crouched over me.
His clothes were torn from fighting Alice. Scratches crossed his face. His eyes were not wild in the way people say eyes are wild. They were focused. That was worse.
He grabbed me around the waist.
I understood then.
Not guessed.
Understood.
He was going to drag me away like meat.
The knowledge entered me whole and settled beside the knife wound.
“No,” I tried to say, but it came out broken.
Frank lifted me partly off the floor as if I weighed nothing. My body folded wrong against him. Pain flashed white through my stomach.
Staring down at me with hunger in his eyes, he drank like a starving man who had forgotten every rule he had ever learned to fit into the niche of an average human being.
The sound arrived before I understood what it was. Frank staggered sideways and hit the counter. Alice remained standing where she was, breathing slightly harder now, a loose strand of black hair stuck to her cheek. She looked down at herself.
There was a tear running through the front of her shirt.
For a few seconds she said nothing. She touched the torn fabric with two fingers and pulled at it slightly, as if hoping it would somehow look different the second time.
"My clothes."
Frank looked up at her.
"My fucking clothes."
The sentence landed strangely in the middle of everything else. Customers were still shouting. Somebody near the entrance was crying. Glass crunched somewhere under a shoe. The coffee machine hissed behind the counter. And yet for a moment all of it seemed less important than the tear in Alice's shirt.
"You ruined them."
She said it quietly, almost thoughtfully.
Then she sighed.
"You absolute idiot."
The pan came down again.
Frank swore and rolled away from her, one hand pressed against the side of his head. Alice watched him for a second, then looked back down at the shirt.
It was obvious she was trying to decide which of the two things annoyed her more.
Kicked to the side by the raging Alice, I hit my head against the bottom corner of the kitchen island.
When I could see again, they were above me, both armed, both bleeding, both shouting things that no longer formed sense. They cut each other, missed each other, cut me instead. Once across the shoulder. Once somewhere high on my chest. Maybe my breast. Maybe my collarbone.
I reached up because they were going to kill me without meaning to.
Or meaning to.
It no longer mattered.
I grabbed at their wrists, sleeves, skin, anything. The knives moved too close to my hands. I felt something tear. I pushed one blade away and it struck Frank. I shoved Alice and she gasped, looked down, and saw new blood on her beloved shirt. For a second both of them stared at me as if I had betrayed them by being in the way.
Then they remembered each other.
They turned back with such hatred that it almost looked like recognition.
I crawled.
My palms slipped.
The blood was warm under me. I dragged myself toward the gap between the counter and the pastry display, toward anywhere that was not beneath them. Behind me they screamed.
“You lied,” Frank said.
Alice laughed, but there was strain in it now. “About what?”
“You know what.”
“I know lots of things.”
“You told me you were a virgin.”
“I am.”
“You talk like you know everything.”
“I do.”
“You don’t know anything.”
The words came between strikes. Between curses. Between the sounds of bodies hitting metal, glass, tile. They were no longer fighting like coworkers, or enemies, or strangers. They were fighting like two people trying to crawl inside the same wound and tear it wider from within.
I kept crawling.
A cup shattered near my face.
Frank said something filthy. Alice spat something worse back at him. Their voices moved lower, angrier, stranger.
There was the sound of fabric ripping.
I did not turn around. I did not want to see. I saw anyway, in pieces, reflected in the lower glass of the display: black cloth, pale skin, blood, Frank’s hand twisted in Alice’s shirt, Alice’s mouth open in a curse that became something else as their lips clashed.
It was not love.
It was not even desire as I understood it.
It was consensual, somehow. That was the part that made it worse, not better.
Neither of them was forced. Neither of them softened.
They kept fighting. Kept cutting. Kept insulting each other. They tore away only what they needed and used each other like another weapon of hurt and pleasure.
Alice, who had spoken so coldly about sex, was no longer speaking coldly. Frank, who had looked fifty and ruined and hungry, laughed once against her throat and then cursed when she hurt him again.
They hated each other.
They wanted nothing from each other except impact.
And in the middle of that, they forgot me.
For the first time since the knife entered my stomach, I was grateful to be forgotten.
I crawled past the counter. Or tried to. My arm failed. My cheek hit the floor. The bakery lights buzzed overhead. The bell over the door was still ringing sometimes, although now only the last few people were escaping.
I heard my brothers crying. I heard someone shouting into a phone. I heard the strange child ask a question from somewhere near the doorway, but I do not remember the words.
Outside, Luke was walking past.
He was not supposed to be there. The bakery was not in our old neighbourhood. The concrete blocks were not his. None of it belonged together, but dreams care less about maps than they care about timing.
He saw people running out.
At first he thought there was a fire.
Of course he did. He was a firefighter. Fire made more sense than whatever this was.
He pushed through the fleeing customers and came inside.
There was no fire.
There was bread in the baskets. Coffee on the counter. Cake behind glass. Phones recording from the floor. Blood across the tiles.
And me.
He saw me before I saw him.
I know that because his face changed in a way no stranger’s face would have. Shock first, then recognition, then decision. He came over the counter rather than around it. Fast. Faster than anyone had moved all morning for any reason that mattered.
“Hey,” he said, kneeling beside me.
Out of focus.
I tried to answer.
Blood came into my mouth. Or maybe I imagined that. Maybe it was only the taste of fear.
He looked once behind me. Only once. Whatever he saw there was enough. He slid one arm under my shoulders and one under my knees.
The pain of being lifted was so complete that for a second I stopped being a person and became only a sound.
“I know,” he said, although I had not said anything. “I know. Stay with me.”
My brothers followed. I heard them. Small footsteps, panicked breathing, someone crying harder when Luke lifted me. I wanted to tell them not to look back. I wanted to tell them I was fine. I wanted to tell them this was not their fault, not their memory to carry, not their blood on the floor.
I could not speak.
Luke carried me outside.
The grey sky opened above us, low and indifferent. People stood on the pavement, pale and useless, phones in their hands, mouths still moving. Sirens were coming from somewhere. The ambulance station was only a few hundred meters away, just like in real life. He ran toward it with me in his arms, calling emergency services, calling police, calling someone, everyone, anyone.
The bakery fell behind us.
I never saw what happened to Alice and Frank.
Not clearly.
The police must have arrived. Maybe they shouted. Maybe Alice and Frank resisted. Maybe they were shot. Maybe they never made it that far. Maybe they bled out on the floor still locked together, still fighting, still unable to stop even when there was nothing left to win.
I do not know whether they survived.
I do not know whether I survived.
The dream ended before mercy could enter it.
Only the last image remained.
Not mine.
The security camera’s.
The footage was grey and grainy. The bakery looked smaller from above, almost fake, a little model of a place where something had gone wrong. Chairs overturned. Glass broken. Phones abandoned on the floor. The counter smeared dark. Blue police light flickered through the windows and washed everything in pulses.
Two bodies lay behind the counter.
Out of focus.
Ruined shapes, cooling on the tile.
Between them stood the butter.
Perfectly upright.
Still wrapped.
Untouched.
The camera focused on it as if it had been waiting for that all along.
Everything else blurred.
The butter did not melt.
The butter did not move.
The butter had survived the incident.
