By Debbie Feit
Gentle blankets become pillows, rising to attention, coming into fullness, their folds holding all that has been gathered—the decadent, the luscious, the creamy. The simple transformed into simply spellbinding by virtue of the glazed, the dusted, the crumbled.
Mouths clamoring for the petalled and pistachioed, they trek to get a taste…only to face an empty space. Told to return in the morning.
They do. They purchase one of the bloomed triangles. Two are placed in the bag. “People say they’ll come back,” the ponytailed brunette says. “But they never do.”
Their hearts lift. Their smiles, their joy…boundless; seemingly disproportionate to the croissant they have been gifted.
The girl behind the counter couldn’t have known that one had just lost her father; that the other feared losing her mother. She couldn’t have known the extent of their grief and fatigue that they sought to soothe by wrapping themselves up in matching metaphorical “I Love NY” sweatshirts and eating their way through the city.
Just as they couldn’t have known that kindness tastes of honey, walnuts and almond cream.
Debbie Feit is an accidental mental health advocate, unrelenting Jewish mother and author of The Parent’s Guide to Speech and Language Problems (McGraw-Hill) in addition to numerous texts to her children that often go unanswered. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Five South, Passengers Journal, Kveller, The Aurora Journal, Emerge Literary Journal, Five Minutes and Words & Whispers, as well as on her mother’s bulletin board. She is at work on a novel whose completion she some days fears may also be fictitious. You can read about her thoughts on mental health issues, her life as a writer and her husband’s inability to see crumbs on the kitchen counter on Instagram and Twitter or at debbiefeit.com.