The bell above the door jingles—a single, bright note that cuts through the smell of yeast and burnt sugar like a knife through butter. The air inside is thick and warm, pressurized with anticipation. I step into the glow of the fluorescent lights, the kind that hum slightly but never form words or shapes in the corners of my vision.

A woman behind the counter looks up from a stack of newspapers she’s folding. Her hands are flour-dusted, her apron stained with decades of spills and successes alike. She doesn’t look at me with suspicion, doesn’t scan my face for the fractals I used to see in everyone else. She just sees a customer who needs bread.

“Fresh out of the oven,” she says, gesturing to a glass case where loaves rise like golden hills under plastic domes. The heat waves off them, distorting the air in straight, invisible lines. “Whole wheat, sourdough, you know the drill.”

“The usual,” I say, and my voice sounds steady. “Sourdough. And maybe… just one of those baguettes on the side.”

“Coming right up.” She pulls a loaf from the case, wrapping it carefully in brown paper before placing it on the counter. The sound of the paper crinkling is loud in this quiet space, a sharp, organic noise that reminds me of nothing magical and everything real. “Five dollars.”

I reach into my pocket again. My fingers close around the coins, feeling their cold weight—the copper, the zinc, the nickel. No seeds inside them. No hidden messages waiting to be decoded if I press hard enough on the edges. Just money, meant for bread, meant to keep the shop open until lunch rush.

“Here you go,” she says, taking my wallet and pressing it into her register with a practiced motion. The cash drawer pops open with a mechanical *click*, a sound so perfectly mundane that it almost makes me laugh if I weren’t standing in awe of how ordinary this feels. “That’ll be it.”

I take the bread, feeling the warmth radiating through the paper onto my palms. It’s heavy. Solid. Real. “Thanks,” I say, and mean it. Not because of some grand cosmic reason or a hidden pattern in her kindness, but simply because she sold me food when I was hungry. Because we both exist in this space together, breathing the same air, sharing the same light.

She nods back, returning to her papers, folding them with efficient folds that create no strange creases. The steam from the oven continues to rise, carrying only heat and flour dust now, nothing else. And for a moment, I let myself just breathe in that scent, letting it fill my lungs without looking for shapes within it.

Outside, the city is still waking up properly—cars starting engines with their familiar rumble, pedestrians rushing toward work or breakfast, the world moving forward with no need for me to unlock anything first. The bread feels warm against my chest as I walk out of the shop and back into the streetlight. It’s a small thing. A loaf of sourdough in a paper bag. But holding it like this, knowing that everything is exactly as it should be, makes me feel lighter than air.

I don’t look for shadows. I don’t tap the doorframe twice. I just turn left down the block, heading toward home with my pocket full of warmth and my head clear enough to think about what I might actually want to write on those blank pages tomorrow.