Source A: Bread before daylight

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

By Tom Reyes

I arrived at the bakery at twenty past two in the morning expecting warmth. In my imagination, there would be wooden shelves, flour floating softly through golden light and a cheerful baker lifting perfect loaves from an oven. I had confused making bread with an advertisement for making bread.

The real entrance was beside a row of bins in a service yard. Inside, the ceiling lights were white and unforgiving. Stainless-steel bowls stood in a line, each large enough to bathe a child in. A mixer turned with a low mechanical thump. Nobody sang. Nobody even spoke above the machines.

Sana, who managed the night shift, handed me a paper hat and pointed towards a clock.

“We are already eleven minutes behind,” she said.

For the next hour, the bakery seemed to be governed entirely by numbers. Forty trays. Six racks. Three temperatures written on a board. Timers sounded from different corners, and each sound sent someone towards an oven or a bowl. The workers divided dough, weighed it, turned it, covered it and began again. Their movements were so practised that I mistook speed for thoughtlessness.

“Doesn’t it become automatic?” I asked Sana.

She pressed two fingers into a mound of dough and watched the hollow slowly rise.

“The routine is automatic,” she said. “The decisions aren’t.”

She asked me to touch the dough. It was warmer than I expected and seemed almost to lean back against my hand. Sana explained that the same written recipe could behave differently from one night to the next. The flour might absorb more water; the room might be warmer; a delivery might arrive late. The numbers on the board were a beginning, not a guarantee.

Soon afterwards, one batch proved her point. A tray of rolls had spread sideways until they touched, losing the neat round shape shown on the order sheet. I expected frustration, perhaps even the bin. Sana looked at them for several seconds, then changed the morning list. They would become filled rolls for the market café, which had asked for a larger size the previous week.

“Bread does not read the schedule,” she said, already adjusting the next mixture.

The sentence was funny, but it also rearranged the room for me. The clocks and scales did not remove judgement; they created the conditions in which judgement could matter. I began to notice pauses I had missed before: a worker listening to the crust of a loaf as he squeezed it, another holding a tray near her face to examine its colour, Sana rejecting a timer’s instruction because the centre of the dough was still cool.

At four o’clock, empty delivery crates were set out. Their labels named places I knew in daylight: the primary school, the hospital café, the small shop beside the park, the hostel near the ring road. Until then, the bakery had felt sealed away from the town, awake at an hour when nearly everyone else was sleeping. The labels turned the metal room into a kind of starting point. Breakfasts, packed lunches and hurried cups of tea were already being prepared for people who had not yet opened their curtains.

Sana gave me the first acceptable roll from the corrected batch. Its crust broke sharply, but the centre folded under my thumb. I ate it standing beside the cooling racks. It was not the graceful tasting I had imagined; I was wearing a paper hat, my sleeve was dusted with flour and a timer was complaining behind me. Still, the bread seemed less ordinary because I had watched so many small judgements gather inside it.

At half past five, Sana opened the loading door. Cold blue light entered the bakery, flattening the brightness of the ceiling lamps. Vans reversed towards the crates while the workers began cleaning bowls for the next shift.

I had arrived thinking that night work was a mechanical prelude to the real life of the morning. As the first van left, I understood that the morning had been under construction for hours.