She kept a starter older than herself. Forty-three years of flour, water, and whatever was in the air on any given morning.
The apprentice sent a sample to a lab. The report listed twelve species of bacteria, four strains of yeast, relative abundances to three decimal places.
She read the report the way you’d read a street map of a city you’d lived in for decades. Everything on it was correct. Nothing on it was the city.
He asked if they could recreate it from the species list. She said you could recreate the population. Not the forty-three years of Tuesday mornings that had shaped which populations survived.
The bread was the population. The taste was the Tuesdays.