The Air in the Bread

The bakery was warm before the sun was anything. Maya had flour on her eyebrows and did not know it. Soren was measuring, because he liked measuring, and because his aunt Runa had handed him the scale and said good, you do the numbers, I will do the fire.

The dough under Maya's hands felt alive. It pushed back. It breathed out little sour smells when she folded it, and she folded it again just to smell the breath come out.

"It's mostly air," Runa said, sliding a tray into the oven. "Bread is trapped air. The yeast eats the flour and burps, and the burps get stuck. That's the holes."

Maya pressed a thumb into the risen dough and watched it slowly fill back in. Something in the bakery was made of air. She kept that. She had a list in her head of things that were secretly made of air, and it had exactly one item on it now, and she liked it there.

Soren was reading the back of a museum pamphlet that had come home in Runa's apron pocket and gotten dusted white. He read the way he did, slowly, like he was checking each word for weight.

"Aunt Runa," he said. "This says that a hundred years ago, people were afraid the whole world was going to run out of food. Not one country. The whole world."

"Mm," said Runa, not really listening, watching the fire.

"It says the soil was running out of something," Soren said. "Nitrogen. Plants need it and the soil kept giving it away in every harvest and it wasn't coming back fast enough." He looked up. "But there's nitrogen right here. It's most of the air. We're breathing it right now."

Maya stopped folding. "How much?"

"Says almost four parts in five," Soren read. "Every breath. Four fifths of it, nitrogen."

Maya breathed in on purpose and felt it be true. Most of what went into her was the thing the plants were starving for.

"That doesn't make sense," she said. "If it's everywhere, why would anyone starve?"

Soren checked the pamphlet again, then set it down, because it didn't say. "Maybe the plants can't reach it."

Runa turned around then, wiping her hands. "They can't," she said. "That kind of nitrogen holds hands with itself. Two nitrogens, gripped so tight nothing can pry them apart. A plant sits in a whole ocean of it and can't take one bite. Starving in the middle of a feast." She shrugged. "That's what my grandmother's fields were. Hungry dirt."

Maya looked at the dough. She looked at the air above the dough, which was invisible, which was four fifths locked. She held her own breath a second, feeling the locked thing sit inside her chest, doing nothing, going back out unchanged.

"So somebody unlocked it," she said. It wasn't a question. She could feel the shape of the answer before she had it, the way you feel a stair in the dark with your foot.

"Somebody figured out how to pry the two nitrogens apart," Soren said, slow, working it. "Squeeze the air. Heat it. Push it hard enough that it lets go and grabs onto something else instead." He looked at his aunt. "Is that a real thing? Can you do that?"

"They built machines the size of towns to do it," Runa said. "Still running. Right now, somewhere, one of them is pulling the air apart so a field somewhere else can eat." She said it plainly, the way she said everything, and went back to the fire.

Soren picked the pamphlet back up. His hand had gone still on it. Then he read the last line out loud, quietly, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to.

"It says the nitrogen from those machines is in the bodies of about half the people alive. Half." He put the pamphlet down. "Half the people. Made partly out of air that a machine unlocked."

The oven ticked. Maya stood very still with her hands in the dough.

"Say that again," she said.

"Half the people who are alive," Soren said, "couldn't have been made without it. The nitrogen in their muscles. In their skin. Some of it started out as air nobody could touch, and now it's them."

Maya lifted her hand out of the dough and looked at it. The flour on her knuckles. The blue thread of a vein under the skin of her wrist. She was made of things. She had never once wondered where the things came from before they were her.

"It's in me," she said.

"Statistically," Soren said, and then dropped the word because it was too small for what he meant. "Yeah. Probably. In you. In me."

Maya breathed in again, and this time it was different. Four fifths of that breath was the locked kind, the untouchable kind, the kind her body would just send back out. But some part of her, some real part, the part that made her taller this year than last, had come from that same air after all. Pried open in a machine the size of a town. Fed to a wheat field. Ground into flour. Handed to her in a warm bakery in the dark.

"Aunt Runa," Maya said. "The bread we're making right now."

"What about it."

"The wheat ate it. The unlocked air. It's in the flour." Maya looked at the pale dough breathing in her hands. "We're about to eat air that used to be too tight to breathe."

Runa laughed, surprised, the fire orange on her face. "You could put it that way, little scientist. I never did."

Soren was writing now. His pencil moved and stopped and moved. Maya didn't ask what. She was watching the tray Runa pulled from the oven, six loaves gone gold and split down the top where the trapped air had pushed out.

Runa set a hot loaf in front of them to cool. Steam came off it in a slow ribbon and climbed toward the ceiling and thinned out and joined the rest of the invisible room.

Maya reached out and broke the loaf open. The inside was full of holes, hundreds of them, every one a burp of air the yeast had trapped and the heat had caught. She held the two halves apart and looked into all that captured, breathed, unlocked, rebuilt air, still steaming, still leaving, going back up to wherever the next thing was waiting to be pried open.