Mason jar galaxy on a forearm

The starter wouldn't rise again this morning, so I've been sitting on the back step with flour still on my hands, watching the sky over the car park do what it does before five. You'd have laughed at me. I've taken to naming the stars the way you named the hens. Gerald is the bright one above the chippy roof, and the little pale one I can never quite find is Sheila, because she's always off somewhere.

Mr Okonedo's jar is still on the shelf above the proving cabinet. He brought it in last week, an old preserving jar with the rubber ring gone brittle, and asked if I'd keep it for his granddaughter, who flies to Canada in March. She'd been sending postcards of the same three cities, he said, and he wanted to give her something that was nowhere she'd been. He wrote the label himself, FAR AWAY in capitals, pinned to the glass with a bit of tape. I didn't ask him to open it and he didn't offer.

I've been thinking about what it must cost to put a whole sky in a jar and then hand it over. Yesterday I shaped two hundred rolls and not one of them felt like anything. Then at four this morning the oven light came on, the crust started singing the way it does, and I thought, well, that's something a person can carry with them, isn't it.

I'm walking the jar round to the flat this afternoon, before my shift. Come home at Easter if you can. I'll keep the Saturn one warm for you.

Love, Dell