"The Best Baker in All the Land"

 

The baker knew as soon as she took it from the oven that the bread was perfect. It smelled of honey and wheat and earth transformed; its edges were so golden and smooth that it made her think of her lover and blush. Without slicing into it, she could imagine what it was like on the inside--flaky, warm, light as a sunbeam. It was easily the best thing she had ever baked.

She sealed the bread inside a wrapper and shut it inside a cabinet. There was no way she could eat it.

But she could tell her friends and a few of her favorite customers about it. They noticed the sweetly lingering scent of the bread when they visited her at the bakery over the following days. She mentioned the new recipe to them, letting some of her excitement slip into her voice whenever she did. Each of them insisted that they had to try some of this marvelous creation.

In response, the baker would shake her head and wave her hand. "I can't serve that until I'm sure that I can do something that well again. Here, let me give you something else I've been working on." And she would set on a plate a fruit tart, or a slice of marble cake, that the person would sample and instantly crow over, saying that if this was how one of her regular offerings tasted, surely that special bread must be divine.

It didn't take long for the baker's reputation to grow, spreading throughout the city and into the distant countryside. Soon, people were tracking dust from faraway lands onto the town's streets as they headed toward the baker's tiny shop. Those who regularly enjoyed her apple bars and her macaroons swore that each day's goods tasted better than the last. Yet when asked about the baker's specialty, few could say anything about it, other than that the scent of it was rumored to be something out of Heaven's kitchen.

It was on an afternoon when the baker was baking more of the eclairs that had left the mayor in tears that she went looking in her cabinet for more ingredients and found the bread. Moisture had seeped through the wrapper; the green mold covering the bread made it look like a hill in a shepherd's field. For a minute, she grieved. Then she looked at the first tray of eclairs she had made and shrugged. She cut the mold away, threw the rest of the bread to the pigeons in the alley, and returned to the work she had yet to do, becoming in that quiet moment the best baker in all the land.

"The Next Big Thing Is Here"

 

The sculptor ran his fingers over the words he had engraved onto the mirrored surface. Then, with a sigh, he took his screwdriver from the pocket of his vest, crouched, and began working to liberate his sculpture from the pedestal that had supported it for the past several months.

It was because each side of the cube he had crafted bore a mirror that he saw the two boys approaching from the other side of the garden. As long and lean as they were, he assumed that their reflections were being pulled thin because of the distance--"Objects in Mirror Are More Awkwardly Adolescent Than They Appear." Only when the boys were next to the sculptor, and he stood to acknowledge them, did he realize that the mirror had actually diminished their gangliness.

One boy said to him, "So did you, like, put this here?"

"Nope," the sculptor replied cheerfully, "I'm just looting and pilfering." The boys looked at each other sideways, and the sculptor eased his stance into something approaching friendliness. "I made this last year," he told them, "and then I set up here back in April. So yeah, I put it here."

"Okay, so," the same boy said. He shifted on the balls of his feet. "What is it?"

The sculptor let his shoulders fall. "Look, if I have to explain public art to you, it's already a lost cause."

The boys said nothing, confirming every little voice speaking out in the sculptor's head. But then the second stepped forward, his arms crossed in front of his chest like a shield. "You don't have to explain it," he said, "but is it, like, metaphor?"

As an artist, the sculptor sometimes felt as if he owed it to the world to look upon it with pity. He tried not to reveal this thought as he spoke. "Okay, here's what I was thinking about this work," he said, stepping toward them as if laying out a secret. "It's shaped like a box, right?" The boys looked at the cube and nodded. "With boxes, we're all taught to think about what's inside them. And with the words 'The Next Big Thing Is Here' on it, you assume that the Next Big Thing is inside, whatever it is." He raised a hand and lifted a finger. "But the whole cube is mirrored. All the world around the cube becomes part of the Here. And that means that anything we see around us can be the Next Big Thing. Even--" he folded his hands together "--the person looking at the cube."

The two boys glanced at each other. "So you're trying to get people to think outside the box," said Boy Number Two.

The sculptor's hands separated, and his fingers spread apart like the rays of a firework; suddenly, nothing was as it seemed in the mirror, which made everything around him wonderful. "Yes," he said, his eyes and mouth gone wide, "yes, exactly!"

"Nice," the first boy said as he and his friend turned to leave. As they walked away, the sculptor heard the second one say, "This whole time I thought it was an ad for something." And then the sculptor sighed once more and took his screwdriver to the base of the sculpture, because he didn't want to think about everything being screwed.

"Glue Skin"

 

"Teacher, look, I'm peeling my skin off!"

"Jenny, you have until I'm done writing this problem on the board to clean up your art supplies."

"Teacher, why am I all red and squishy underneath? Is that where blood comes from? I think I see my bones. I'm a skeleton! Raaaa! I'm dropping my skin on all of you!"

Lessons put into practice during arts and crafts that day: using fine motor skills. Following a sequence of events. Walking, not running, on the way to the principal's office.

"The Common Path"

 

"I saw a piece like this at an art exhibit last year," Ada said to her grandmother as they walked. "Some artist dumped snow all over a space inside and had people walk a path across most of it, except at one point a set of footprints veered away from the main path."

"And what was the message of that one? Wait, let me guess," said Mrs. Alvarez. "The melting snow represented all the money the museum was pissing away on stuff it called 'modern art.' Eh?" She bared her dentures in a smile. "Am I right?"

Ada patted her shoulder. "It was the artist suggesting that it doesn't matter whether or not you do something different from everyone else--we all fade and die in the end."

Mrs. Alvarez frowned, trying to shoo away the thought with a wave of her hand. "Ah, you always remember the ones who break away from the crowd," she said. "Did I ever tell you about Jack Derany, from summer camp? We took quite a few of our own hikes apart from the group, if you know what I mean." And Ada's eyes widened and the snow crunched under her boots as the two continued down a path traveled by many people before, the one along which people learn that their family members are human after all.