The baker felt in his heart that he was a wizard who could do all different kinds of magic. ‘What isn’t magical,’ he thought, ‘about taking things that look nothing like bread, and making something that brings people together as if drawn by some unseen force?’
He loved this feeling, because he had once been a boy who read books about wizards and witches late into the night while hiding under his bedsheets, and he remembered wishing very hard then that, one day, he might become a wizard himself. And now, he thought, he finally was.
Despite this belief in magic, he froze when he came into the bakery one morning and saw that the bread dough, left overnight to rise, had not only risen, but was floating in the air next to the oven.
Later he would remember something he had read in a book: ‘How are our waking memories any different than our memories of dreams? After all, a star is the stuff of dreams, no? But, alas, a star is in our waking world, so the magic is invisible to us.’
He would remember the floating dough for the rest of his life, and it would be the last thing he thought about before taking his last breath in that town by the sea where they used to mine iron, and where he had opened the bakery.
‘Oh-no!’ someone whispered. He turned and saw a woman, and his first thoughts, as they always were when he saw her, were, first, ‘she is beautiful,’ and second, ‘that is my wife.’ She was, indeed, beautiful. Her skin, eyes and hair combined to make something akin to a pastry pulled from the ovens of the gods.
He stared, and she fidgeted with the knot of her apron while avoiding his eyes. He heard the floating dough drop with a flop back into its bowl, and all that then lingered in the air was silence and the smell of yeast. ‘It helps the bread,’ she said all at once.
The baker made a noise that sounded like a question.
‘The floating. It helps the bread. It helps the yeast and the dough and water sort out their differences. At least, that’s what the loaves tell me when they come out of the oven all happy and talkative.’
She looked nervous, but, after a few moments, he nodded, as if what she had said made complete sense. She glanced at him, trying to make a connection, but his eyes were looking at something far away, and many, many years ago, under the light of a flashlight under his bedsheets. Then his eyes found hers once again, and a grin spread across his face. He laughed, and said: ‘I guess witches are real, too.’ 
