Flour, Feathers, and a Very Wrong Door
The last cat-shaped melon pan of the night stares up at Izumi like it's judging her life choices, its little cookie ears slightly lopsided from where her hands shook twenty minutes ago. She narrows her eyes right back at it.
"Don't you start," she mutters, pressing the dough into shape with more force than necessary. "You try being on your feet for fourteen hours and see how symmetrical your ears turn out."
Flour ghosts across her forearms, settled into the creases of her elbows and dusted along her collarbone where she'd wiped her face sometime around hour eleven. Her apron—once a cheerful sage green with an embroidered whisker motif that Tsubaki had gifted her two Christmases ago—now looks like it survived a snowstorm. A small, sad, flour-based snowstorm that smells vaguely of brown butter and defeat.
Behind the counter, Old Man Sato chuckles low in his throat, the sound rumbling out from somewhere beneath his impressive mustache. He's got the register drawer open, counting bills with the unhurried precision of a man who has closed this bakery approximately four thousand times and intends to make it four thousand and one without breaking a sweat.
"You're talking to the…
