Saint-Viateur at Two

The line goes past the door and down the block, because it always does, because it's two in the morning and this is what the city does to heal from the nightlife.

Wood smoke first. You catch it four doors up, before you've made the corner, and it will be in the wool of your coat for a week afterward, surfacing at odd moments, in elevators, in other people's kitchens.

Inside it's thirty degrees warmer than the street and the air has weight to it — flour hanging in the light over the bench, the sweet scorch of the honey water where the dough goes before the oven, and under all of it the resin smell of maple burning down to coals at the far end of the room.

Three years ago she pulled one out of the bag before we were even out the door, too hot to hold, passing it hand to hand, and said this is how you know you're alive. She was twenty-four. It was a bagel. She meant it.

I still come. Sesame, dozen, cash only.

The bakers work the peel like men who are bored, which they are, and who have been doing this since before the neighbourhood was worth anything. One of them lands sixteen off the plank in a single motion, a long sweep from the shoulder, and doesn't watch where they go.

The woman ahead of me orders in French and gets French, no negotiation, none of the usual dance. I order in English and get English. Everybody gets fed.

Outside, the bag is warm against my chest through the coat and the cold comes up off Saint-Viateur to meet it.

They'll be stale by tomorrow. They were never going to keep.

I eat two on the walk home.