Reference No. 120911 Empire Baking Company

Item description: Jewish Rye
Tax: 8.25%
Total: 3.79
Tendered: 4.00
Change: 0.21

This receipt comes from 12:20 PM some 8 years ago. I don't recall whether I went there to buy the bread alone, or with my father – we shared a love for good bread, especially rye – but either way the piece of paper holds in its folds more than it really needs to. It was held secure in The Man Without Qualities – did I read that book that year, or earlier? – folded inattentively. I was then unaware of its fate.

Silly, that a simple piece of paper can have the power to distract one from reading all about things... things and theories thereof, and new materialisms and object-oriented-ontologies and speculative realisms. All vibrant matter, or material for our projections, or something else entirely. The paper is a little yellowed, but the ink was remarkably good: it's still legible. The paper smells oddly sweet, not at all like bread. That must be from the slowly ageing pages in the book.

I used to love going there. The bread was something we shared; going there and smelling the freshly baked bread and deliberating and eventually, finally, after a sample or two, choosing one.

I remember him having a coffee one morning ( I think I had a chocolate milk) at some corner restaurant long since gone, after we'd stopped in at Eckerd to buy my mother a gift for mother's day. It was special. That was before we started going to Empire, but it's all in the same vein.

The receipt didn't have a note in it, like my great grandfather's wallet did, detailing the contents. No World War One medals here, but the receipt might as well be a sign from Meuse-Argonne, it's wrinkled like that old particoloured ribbon.

And its silence puts my words to shame.   

Red-brown things

The apple browns unchecked
Half-eaten, yet another thing on the desk
Next to the little wooden buddha, the inedible chestnut
One might think this were still life
Painting, or a hollow stroke of time