He doesn’t sneak in. Morris arrives the way a natural disaster arrives—without warning and with complete commitment to chaos. Nine hundred pounds of moose, casually wandering down the main thoroughfare of the competition grounds like he paid the entry fee, and he has chosen my competition station as ground zero for his personal grain investigation.
He walks directly through my prep area like the rules of human interaction don’t apply to him, which, in Morris’s case, they apparently don’t.
“Whoa—” I reach out uselessly, because you do not grab a moose, but he’s already nudged my flour container with the side of his enormous face and it explodes like a culinary bomb. Whitepowder erupts everywhere. It coats my shoes, my apron, my hair. My hair is now flour-white. I look like a person dusted for fingerprints.
Morris sniffs at my spice rack with the scientific interest usually reserved for arson investigators, knocks it sideways with his massive head, and distributes cinnamon across a ten-foot radius with the precision of an artillery unit.
“Jesus,” someone mutters. I don’t know who. Everyone is staring.
Jax shouts from the crowd, “CHAOS FACTOR ENGAGED! FOLKS, WE ARE NOW WITNESSING UNPREDICTABLE PRECIPITATION!”
Jace steps forward and says, “Morris, come,” in a tone that implies he knows this moose, which apparently he does. Morris ignores him completely and lunges at a bowl of what I think is honey, everything is sticky, everything is flour, my organizational system has collapsed into entropy. He gets his massive hoof in it, wheels around like a dog trying to shake water off, and does exactly that.
I’m hit with a spray of honey and sourdough starter. Actual honey. Actual living culture, splattered across my apron, my hands, my left shin. This is my penance for classicism. This is what happens when you assume technique transcends environment. This is the universe telling me I don’t belong here.
Morris looks pleased. He has accomplished something. He has created chaos and he is satisfied.
“I’m so sorry,” Jace is saying holding a broom trying to steer Morris away, and Morris is completely unbothered by this development. Jace is trying to steer him out of the competition area while Morris is wandering backward, actively resistant to leaving his site of chaos.
Birdie, from three booths down, does not look up from her three-tiered blueberry masterpiece. She’s a woman whowould continue her work while a meteor hit. Her competence is weaponized. She barely glances over before returning to whatever delicate architectural work she’s doing with fruit.
“Okay,” I say aloud, laughing in the hysterical register that I use when everything is breaking. I learned this laugh in my marriage to Marco. The choice between laughing and screaming, and screaming feels worse. “Okay. This is fine.”
Nothing about this is fine.
Jace returns from Morris-wrangling and looks at my station—the flour explosion, the honey splatter, the dough that still refuses to rise, the cinnamon hoofprints everywhere.
He hands me a spatula I didn’t ask for. Then a pastry cutter. Then a decorating brush, despite the fact that I am not decorating anything except this disaster.
“I haven’t asked for those,” I say, not unkindly.
“You will,” he says.
“How are you so sure?”
“Because I know what you’re building.”
Something about this lands in my chest, but I don’t have time to process it because the clock is counting down and my dough still looks like a small, sad lump.
The dough continues not to rise. The clock continues to count down. Patrice in the crowd has now physically handed the kid to Trace, who is holding Brooklyn with one arm while his wife has some kind of laughing fit that involves her holding her stomach and making sounds that might be concerning if I didn’t know her. Jax is narrating my continued spiral with the enthusiasm of someone broadcasting a championship match.
“The sourdough stands at a height of—let’s see—still not double. Still disappointing. Ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching the critical failure zone. The Outside Baker’s classical training is becoming what we in the sports world call ‘a liability.’”
I take my not-risen dough and bake it anyway, because I have run out of options and time is a cruel master. It doesn’t feel right when I’m putting it in the oven. Dough that hasn’t risen properly has a different weight to it, a different density. But it’s three hours and I’m out of runway, so into the oven it goes.
While it’s baking, I attempt a presentation that was supposed to be “elegant classical presentation with modern Alaskan elements.” It looks like I arranged accidents. There’s flour dust on everything. My hands are still sticky from the honey. There’s a cinnamon handprint on my left hip where Morris hit me. I’m covered in evidence of failure.
Birdie’s blueberry creation comes out of the oven looking like it was assembled by someone with an architectural degree and a personal relationship with geometry. Three perfect tiers. Each one a different flavor—I can tell because she’s labeled them with tiny cards. Blueberries are arranged with thought, in a pattern that suggests intention and planning. It probably tastes like a summer day feels.
My sourdough comes out of the oven dense and compact, like a brick that someone tried to bake into the shape of bread through sheer force of will. It didn’t rise in the oven either. It just baked itself into a small, hard disaster.
When the judging happens, I stand next to my station and watch the judges—three people I don’t know, presumably actual bakers—examine each entry. They taste things. They make notes. They move down the line like they’re assessing a crime scene.
When they get to me, one of them tastes the sourdough.
Her face doesn’t change. She swallows. She moves on. No note written. No feedback offered.
Birdie wins. Someone named Derek takes second with a spruce-tip shortbread situation that looks like it came from aprofessional bakery. A woman I don’t recognize gets third with honey cake that probably tastes like optimism.