Hot and Bready!

There were many things to be thankful for during the season of harvest. Sweltering heat no longer bearing down every day, the gorgeous autumn warmth of amber and crimson leaves dotting against the backdrop of a perfect sunset sky. How nippy the air grew around that time, urging you to call the evening early so you could spend your next hours before bed with a full stomach and a cozy fire to chase the eventual cold away before it could begin. Bug found the season so romantic despite his own preference for breezy summer days. Particularly, the bountiful food aspect directly after harvest meant the trading markets would become flooded with the variety of juicy crops and home goods. Even more specifically, Bug enjoyed such bountiful prospects without a need to go far from home in the first place! He would get his pick of the bounty from his dear old brother Kestrel and that farm he cultivated alongside Kes’s close friend Sputnik.

Bug let it be known for the record that he is not the fondest heart of that elk of a woman. What was family if not to reap benefits of someone else doing all the hard, manual labor of maintaining a farm? What harm could he possibly ever pose through laying in their orchard to gorge on ripe fruits? No, he was not rather thankful for her blunt demeanor nor her stubborn determination to chase him off like a pest whenever she caught him red-hooved. Kes would never do such a rude thing to him!

Also let it be known for the record that Bug is not as selfish nor lazy a brother as that witch makes him out to be! Today was not spent bumming around to sun himself in the waning daylight’s peak, no sir! Driven by spite— er, homey, family love! Yeah that’s it— Bug started this morning toiling by the sturdy, stone oven, promptly missing the best hours of suntime through the day. With a basket of honeydew melons as his witness, the petite deer tied back the long pieces of his hair and selected the first of them as sacrifice to the art of breadmaking. Kes loved honeydew, and every year without fail Sputnik ensured they would have no shortage of them to last through the wintertime. While his brother would most often been seen “stealing” them straight from the patch to crack open and devour raw, Bug knew he could deliver something new and delicious for Kes to munch on!

Famous last words: How hard could baking bread be?

In his first attempt, he hadn’t mashed up the honeydew innards as finely as he thought. The thick, pulpy insides prevented the bread from baking through evenly, until the constant in-out left Bug with a hardened brown outside and a mushy, nearly raw inside. Into the bin for later— the local wildlife will enjoy eating it more than Kestrel would.

By the third attempt, Bug realized he should try this endeavor two loaves at a time to maximize his chances for success. After his arms grew tired of all the mashing and grinding of pulp, his mind grew weary from keeping track of all the proportions he went through. What he originally thought to be the issue of thick, chunky pulp, then turned into a sore problem of too much puree anyway with similar failures. Finding the right combination of flour, sugar, and honeydew snowballed into a headache he could’ve never foreseen.

Yet he endured! Tears in his eyes from the smoke of another burnt loaf, Bug refused to back down from the challenge and sliced open another melon. The basket of honeydew versus the bin of “food for the animals” grew unbalanced over the course of hours. Morning shifted to midday, midday crawled into afternoon. At one point, handprints of flour were left staining the long, luscious sheen of his tail, now braided up after one horrific mishap of tripping over its length along the floor— no matter how hard he scrubbed, he knew there was still batter between the floorboards.

Bug would sit and take breaks during the hour baking time for the loaves. At first. By afternoon it became apparent he could no longer lollygag in that manner or he risked losing it all! That hour was then spent making another batter with adjustments that he attempted to predict potential failures from the one still rising in the oven. Or breaking up more of the failed loaves to pick apart at their too wet, too dry crumbs, searching for where he went wrong. Or, more humiliatingly, sneaking another trip without anyone seeing him to fetch more honeydew when he ran out completely.

(He had hoped no one would spot him. Kes did. Nothing more than a wrecked, “Hi! Bye!” as Bug dashed away in a dirt cloud trail before Kes’s hands could even form a greeting of his own.)

By nightfall, Bug’s eyes could no longer stay open. He slouched in the chair next to the kitchen, head lolling upon his shoulder as he snoozed. The oven’s fire dimmed. A row of three loaves stood resting on the wooden counter, each missing a small corner piece for a taste test. In his frantic messes and experimentation, he couldn’t tell which one tasted better, or if the taste of honeydew would ever leave his tongue. A bowl with another half-formed batter rested in his lap when Kestrel's head poked in through the door to check on him.

Kestrel carefully picked it out of Bug’s hands without waking him and set it aside. He quietly threw a blanket over his little brother, pinching one of the feather antennae fondly, then peeked at the counter. Each loaf presented itself with a scrawled note of illegible shorthand for numbers. Math? For bread? Kestrel cocked his head. What really mattered here were the descriptors.

1. On the sweeter side. Too sweet for Kes?
2. A bit dry, good taste. Make hot mug for Kes with it?
3. ALMOST. PERFECT. TRY AGAIN??

Well, if it had Kestrel’s name on it—

Kes loved them all. Thank you, Bug.