Gregory Feeley - Fancy Bread

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FANCY BREAD by Gregory Feeley

* * * *

The ogre lifts his rockslide face and sniffs, cavernous nostrils distending. With a

howl of rage—Jack can whiff his breath from where he hides—he stamps the

tree-wide floorboards and cries out in a bowel-solving roar:

* * * *

Fee, fye, fo, fum!

I smell the Blod of an Englysshman!

Be he quicke or be he dede,

I’ll grinde his Bones to make my Brede!

* * * *

Behind the oven grate, Jack feels his shanks quiver as though struck free from

his spine. Wolves came down once from the hills and snatched a village child, and

crows pluck corses on the gibbet; but never did Jack imagine that his end might be

another’s maw. It is a terror beyond reckoning: his sweet flesh guttled like dough.

The ogre’s goodwife assures him that what he smells is simply the remains of

the boy he ate yesterday. Jack squitters in terror but the ogre seems mollified, for he

sits down to be served a tremendous meal. The broth he slurps reeks of a mutton

unknown to Jack’s nose, and his stomach clenks at his mouth’s watering. The ogre

calls for a loaf, and when he sops then cracks loudly, Jack knows what he is

crunching.

The din allows Jack to shift his cramped feet, stirring wisps of ankle-high ash

which conceals hard lumps that bump his toes like riverstones. At last he sinks

aching to his hams, and in the humdrum of the ogre’s guzzling—even terror sates

with surfeit—he nudges one of the lumps and discovers it an unrelieved crust. Jack

brushes away bits of ash with wonder: the ogre, strong enough to disjoint him like a

hen, owns no leaven.

Barrels of ale sluice the ogre’s gullet as Jack squats in a plague pit of bones

and ash. He cradles a rock of grain, pitiful weapon, and wonders at its coarseness. A

memory stirs from childhood, the voice of traveling player declaiming on market

day:

—

Tell me, where is fancy bread,

Or in the heart, or in the head?

—

Hungry with no market-day bun, Jack had yearned for fancy bread, sticky

with sugar and finer than cake, something he had tasted one Whitsunday. Later he

wondered whether the player’s question meant that fancy bread might exist only in

the head, never to be tasted in the stomach. Bread with dough smooth as milk, bread

so soft the toothless could eat it without sopping first. Had such yearnings led him in

time to the hedge of the ogre’s castle?

Replete and belching, the ogre nods at table like a swaying oak, knocks his

spoon to the floor, and soon is snoring deeply. Fearful beyond measure—the

goodwife does not come to aid him—Jack slowly pushes open the grate and creeps

from the oven’s belly, leaving ashy footprints even an ogre could follow.

It seems greatly daring that in his flight Jack could pause to pick up the spoon,

but even in his terror he realizes that no man can be eaten twice. It is as long as his

arm and heavier than any Jack has held, so he clutches it the harder and sneaks past,

breaking into a run at the door.

Later he would try to recall whether he had heard a roar as he burst into

sunlight. He had not looked back, and ran half a mile before slowing. The spoon is

crusted with porridge, and when Jack finishes gasping he sniffs, then tastes it. The

oats are merely greasy, but the tip of his tongue thrills at the metal’s touch. It is

silver, and he later sells it for six shillings. A shard of crust lodged in his pocket he

discards with a shudder.

He never again tried to rob an ogre’s fastness, a lesson learned if not

remembered. (Once he saw a widow lay her dough on a bed of coals then sprinkle it

with hot ashes, and shivered with sourceless dread.) Curled under a pew that night,

cold and still hungry, Jack worries the experience for what else he can take. The day

is already falling from memory like a cinder from burnt fingers, but as Jack nestles

into the rug of sleep a shard presses hard against him, sharp so he feels every word:

Bread made with men’s bones never rise.

* * * *

Starvelings bedded under hedges never rise, either, but rather turn coldly stiff,

in glorious reversal of the Devil’s fell offer to change stones into bread. Jack feels

hardened to petrifaction, but his limbs yield, if complainingly, as he crawls forth,

brushing crumbs of dirt from his coat, to blink at the morning’s pale glare. Gazing

across the fields in the breath-steaming chill, he recognizes barley and, farther on,

what looks to be rye, but nothing that nods like wheat-stalks. Nor pasturage for miles

now: it’s crusts and tubers Jack has to look forward to, assuming he is not offered a

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