Ausiàs Tsel
My son leaves the bread upside down because he is six and the world is a surface you can rearrange.
It’s a barra—too long for the plate, too warm for patience—resting on the tablecloth like a small animal. Crust scored, flour still clinging in the cuts. He rolls it once, absentminded, and the pale belly shows.
My hand moves before my mouth does. I flip it back. Quick. Too quick. A correction with the speed of something ashamed of itself.
He watches my hand, then the bread, then my face.
“Why?”
Because I said so lives in my throat. So does a laugh I don’t want to own. What comes out is the kind of answer adults give when they don’t want to be questioned.
“Because it looks… wrong,” I say. “Like that.”
He squints at the bread as if it has offended him personally.
“What?”
The clean blade of it. Not defiance. Not attitude.
I feel my mouth search for a reason and come up with dust.
“It’s—” I start and stop. My tongue wants to finish the old sentence. The one that used to belong to my mother.
It suffers.
I swallow the last word.
“It’s just one of my… things,” I say instead. The word lands dead on the table between us. Things. Habits. A shrug shaped like language.
Across the table, my mother tears a piece from her slice and chews without looking up. She chews slowly, the way she does now, as if the act is a duty. She wears the same cardigan she’s worn for years, cuffs frayed, buttons replaced with mismatched ones. She is smaller than she used to be. Or maybe I just know how to see it now.
My son looks at her, then back at me.
“Grandma?” he says, hopeful.
My mother’s fingers tighten around her glass. Just a little. The knuckles blanch and then release.
“Eat,” she says to him. Not unkindly. Not warmly. A sentence that does the work of a whole evening.
The knife on my plate has a smear of olive oil on it, gold thin as a film. The bread smells like yeast and heat and the past. The table is crowded with ordinary things: a chipped salt shaker, the small dish of olives, my son’s plastic cup with a cartoon shark. Ordinary, except for the way my chest feels too tight for something so small.
When I was twenty, I used to believe I could kill anything with the right sentence.
My mother would set the bread down and, before cutting, make the sign of the cross with the tip of the knife. A quick X. Not for show. Not for God in the sky. For the table. For the mouths. For the day that had brought food here and could take it away just as easily.
She would turn the loaf if it lay wrong, gentle as if she were righting a child.
“Don’t leave the bread upside down,” she’d say. “It suffers.”
And I—full of books, full of contempt, full of the shining certainty that nothing mattered and therefore I was free—would make my face do what I thought intelligence looked like.
“The bread suffers?” I’d say. A stupid little laugh. “Sure, Mum.”
A small laugh. A small cruelty. Repeated until it stopped being a joke and became a rule.
She never fought me. She didn’t argue theology. She didn’t tell me I was disrespectful. My mother’s way of losing was always quiet. She would just stop doing the thing in front of me. As if it had never been hers.
First the cross on the bread. Then the small sign she made with two fingers at the doorframe before leaving the flat. A touch at the forehead, the chest, a flicker of habit that asked the world not to be cruel.
At night, when she turned the hall light off, she used to say: “See you tomorrow, God willing.”
I erased that too, with the same easy smile. With the same absolute certainty that I was saving her from foolishness. I turned her tenderness into something embarrassing.
Now I’m forty-five, sitting at the table she set, watching her hands pretend they don’t remember.
My son pushes peas around his plate. He lifts the bread again and, because he is six, turns it over once more. Pale side up. He grins, waiting for the rule to arrive.
I flip it back. My fingers press too hard into the crust. A few crumbs break loose and scatter like grit.
“Why does it suffer?” he asks.
I open my mouth.
My mother’s eyes lift to mine. Not angry. Not pleading. Just present, in a way she rarely is now. As if she’s watching to see what I’ll do with it.
It would be so simple to lie. Bad luck. Germs.
Instead, I do the thing I’ve avoided for twenty years: I name where the rule came from.
“Because Grandma says it suffers,” I tell him. My voice comes out steady, which surprises me. “It’s…a way of taking care of things. That’s how we do it.”
My son looks at the bread. Then at my mother.
“Grandma?” he says, again.
My mother’s mouth does something that is almost a smile and then stops, as if the muscles don’t trust it.
It’s stupid, I want to add, out of habit. It’s superstition. It’s nothing. The old reflex twitches in my throat like a cough.
I keep my mouth shut.
My mother looks down at her plate. Her fingers move toward the knife. The tip hovers over the bread as if it might draw the old cross by itself.
It doesn’t.
She cuts a neat slice, straight through, and eats it as if eating were the only ritual she is allowed to have.
After dinner, I wash the plates while my mother dries them, slow, careful. Water runs hot. The steam fogs the window above the sink. Outside, the streetlight makes the kitchen glass look older than it is.
My son brushes his teeth in the bathroom, humming. The sound is thin. A small thing.
My mother folds the dish towel in half, then in half again. A habit of precision. A way to hold herself together.
In the hallway, she pauses at the door.
For a moment her hand lifts, two fingers separating as if they remember the path: forehead, chest. The small private choreography that once meant: keep us safe.
Her hand drops to her side.
She sees me watching and her face closes, polite and empty.
“I’ll go,” she says. “It’s late.”
I nod. I should say something. I should offer to walk her down. I should tell her she can do what she wants in her own house, in her own body, in her own old age. I should tell her I was wrong.
Instead, I do what I always do when something matters: I manage it into silence.
At bedtime, my son climbs under his blanket and makes a small nest of himself. He holds his stuffed shark by the fin, eyes heavy, mouth soft with sleep.
I sit on the edge of the bed. I smooth his hair the way my mother used to smooth mine, thumb tracing the part, a gesture so old it feels borrowed.
“Good night,” he says.
“Good night,” I answer.
The next line rises in me, clean and ready: See you tomorrow, God willing.
It would be so easy to give it to him. Not as doctrine. Not as faith. As a piece of language that says: the future is not guaranteed, so we love each other carefully.
My teeth close around the words.
I stand. I turn off the light.
In the kitchen, the bread sits on the cutting board, right side up. Safe. Correct. A small victory nobody asked for.
In the dark hallway, my mother’s absence is a shape the house knows well.
I walk to my own bed, not touching the walls, as if touch could count as belief.
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Ausiàs Tsel is a Valencian writer working in English and Catalan/Valencian. His work has appeared in Flash Phantoms, and Pithead Chapel, with forthcoming pieces in Neon & Smoke, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Black Sheep: Unique Tales of Terror and Wonder (Hobb’s End Press, 2026). He writes from the Valencian Country.