The Lady from the Bakery (A Monologue)

"There’s a woman waiting and she’s no idea I’m watching. Mornings after the shower seeps into my cracks and I still ain’t waking I pace the carpet barefoot, making a soggy path with my feet. I can’t help looking on my old skin in the mirror and turning away onto the pattern of that bed spread. Yellow, green, and orange flowers puffin’ out like clouds’d make anybody wanna fall back over into sleep and forget about making breakfast or catching a bus in the cold for work.
I moved the curtain off and set myself down beside the old window. I try not to look at the bakery when I’m down out the on the street, cause the first month I moved in here I’d be there every morning for a doughnut or trying different cookies. One afternoon coming home I bought a cake for no good reason, till later I remembered about a niece’s birthday. I was getting pudgy and I could feel it in my body how it didn’t really want that sugary stuff.
There’s a dim light on inside. The thin lady’s pushing her trays of cookies onto shelves and switchin’ on display bulbs inside the glass cases. She knows what all of it tastes like; that’s how she stays so thin. I’ve seen her before leaving the shop carrying a tied up white cardboard box. She probably brings a box of fresh cookies with her to church on Sundays, people I bet know her as the lady from the bakery.
I used to have a box of old recipes from my mother. My sister asked for them for her first daughter who was supposedly something in the kitchen. I called up my mother and asked if she minded me giving them away, cause I didn’t cook much anymore, nothing extravagant. She didn’t give me an OK right off. She was gonna have to think on it she said. I didn’t see why, and she told me that there’d be hollerin’ in heaven if those precious works were just tossed about in the wind like yesterday’s paper. It’s a family bakery so I’m thinking they must be sacred recipes from family long ago in eastern Europe.
Her hair ain’t tied up too well for a gal around food, but she’s wearing gloves it looks like. I bet that’s a cheerful job, surrounded by sweet dough smells and pretty pinks and turquoise icing and the fifty types of wedding cakes that line the three walls. People’ve got to be happy in a bakery, coming to get something good cause they’re going somewhere better. No body every brought cookies to a funeral home viewing.
She’s turned the overhead lights all on. I turn back at my little home, so quiet in the morning and nights. I take my watch from the dresser and snap it’s gold lock over the hairless ring around my wrist. The second hands snapping forward. It’s five to seven, almost time to open."