The Lattelekom Bakery

His granddad wore a ox-cap with the brim turned inside out to keep the sun from splicing his eyes. He toiled for the Lattelekom Bakery for 27 years, delivering spice cake and rye bread. He drove the bakery truck from daylight to nightfall, referring to a ledger with the addresses and names of his customers on the empty seat beside him. His good leg, the one without the wooden peg buckled to the stump, worked the gas peddle and clutch, the wooden one swinging beneath his trouser leg like a wayward child. He shifted with his right hand, his left wiggling the cigarette lighter trying to get the coil to engage with the socket. Every morning before work his granddad ate porridge, covering the top with yellow currants and two spoonfuls of black sugar, grandma complaining that he’d fall stiff dead if he kept eating all that ‘block shugar and yeller death’. The Lattelekom Bakery sat between the Cushman’s Apothecary and the Sears in a red brick building with floury windows and a smokestack growing through the rooftop. The loading bay was round the back adjacent to the Sears’ parking lot, where the baker’s assistant’s stole smokes and teacups of black molasses coffee. His granddad stole away to the loading bay next to the Apothecary exit, fixing himself a shag-end with verses ripped out of grandma’s Gideon. He smoked Matthew, Mark and Luke, rolling the shag-end close to his chest, not wanting to draw attention to himself and have some half-crazed Gomorrahite curse his soul, Revelations wafting through the space in his teeth.