"The Baker", version one

Your words leapt. Brilliant, shimmering leaping, as though throwing off scales of light,
the weight the silvery fish leaves in air, held there by its suddenness.
Your words grew into the insistence of home, a place far from where
many of us have ended up. Your words held in them rooms long since closed, and as you spoke
it was easy to see them open. No wonder everybody came.
Everybody of consequence in the town. And everybody who was nobody. At the broad
foot of the low hill they bunched up and only sometimes spoke amongst themselves.
It's true your words swam over their heads, distant as silver and quick and nobody
entirely got them. Drawn first by the fragrance of bread still warm after the baking,
then by the sight of their friends and relations in a group, the townspeople
stayed under the rushing of the river that was the wind through the trees, the river which took on your words as they leapt upward, turned toward a place you, the townspeople,
the words themselves knew well but had not been to in an age none had realized was so long.
The faces of the townspeople shone in the day's ordinary light. Still and bright as stones in a clear stream, you thought.
So you closed your eyes and opened them to the sky.
At the table afterwards the women and men waited in a long line laughing
and pushing each other. Each exclaimed to you and to their neighbors over the glory
of the bread, the crust chewy but not tough, the center moist but not heavy,
every slice redolent of memory. A few even went ahead and bought a loaf.
And one man bought three but he said, as he helped himself to your butter, that you needed something
more than butter. You needed salted fish sliced thin as a fin;
and juicy, aromatic onions, which he had quantity, the blessing of a harvest
so generous he had been certain much would go to waste, but now, he could see, was
a miracle, really. He understood that God had sent you, the answer to his prayers.