"Afternoon at the Bakery" by Yoko Ogawa
The grief in this story knocked me out cold.
I was going to write something funny to start this off, something quippy and light. I fully planned on planting my tongue inside my cheek while I attempted to transition from Agatha Christie’s Halloween festivities to what I was sure would be a stereotypically spooky ghost story from Yoko Ogawa’s collection Revenge. Then I read “Afternoon at the Bakery.”
I should know better than to think I know what an author is going to do.
Ogawa’s prose is as clean as a cleared writing desk: nothing unnecessary remains and the spaciousness gives the plot room to bloom. The story centers on a mother who is visiting a local bakery to purchase strawberry shortcake for her son’s birthday. (SPOILERS AHEAD!) No one comes out to help her, so she waits in the lobby for what feels like an eternity. A while later, a local shopkeeper comes through, and they make polite conversation. The shopkeeper asks who the strawberry shortcake is for and it’s only then that we find out the woman’s son is dead.
I read this story twice, but I will need to re-read it many more times to catch all its delicate devastation. It would make sense for someone to not want to call this horror, though the other stories in the collection would likely give that reader all the terrifying context they needed.
For me? It was scary enough on its own. It brought back the twisted, sour jab in my stomach that I felt the first time I went grocery shopping after my dear friend Clark died. Around me, people laughed and chatted and reached for milk. They made room for each other’s carts and bantered about the recent cold snap. But I was frozen in place, catatonic in the cereal aisle, almost screaming. How dare anyone act so normal, when the world was ending?
It was too horrifying to contemplate.
