I saw the towel before I saw anything else. It was on the counter, draped over something round, and I want it noted that my reaction was not an overreaction. That towel has a history. That towel has, on more than one occasion, meant the end of my claws as I know them, delivered via her lap and her terrible gentle competence. So when I came around the kitchen doorway and saw it sitting there, bunched and purposeful, I did the responsible thing and left the room at considerable speed.
I regrouped under the hallway table. From there I could see a slice of the kitchen floor and her feet moving around in it, unbothered, which struck me as suspicious in itself. If a towel like that is deployed, there should be some tension in the air. There was none. There was flour. I could smell it even from the hallway, a dry, pale, slightly sweet smell that didn’t belong to anything I’d encountered in that kitchen before, and under it something sharper and stranger, almost sour, that made my whiskers do something involuntary.
I gave it a full ten minutes before I decided the towel situation, whatever it was, did not currently involve me, and crept back in low to the ground to investigate from a safer angle.
She was at the counter with her sleeves pushed up, doing something to a pale lump with the heels of her hands, pressing it down and folding it over and pressing it down again, over and over, with a kind of rhythm that had nothing to do with me at all. There was flour everywhere. On the counter, on her shirt, in a fine drift along the floor where it had missed the bowl entirely. I put one paw into it just to see what would happen and discovered that what happens is the paw turns white and then leaves a very clear, very incriminating print on the next surface it touches, which in this case was the cabinet door, at cat height, impossible to deny.
She saw it and laughed, which I allowed, since I had no real defense.
Eventually the lump went into a bowl, and the bowl went under the towel, and that was when I understood the towel had never been about me at all. This was almost worse. I don’t love being wrong, but I especially don’t love being wrong about something being about me.
I spent a long time sitting as close to that bowl as I was permitted, which was not very close, studying the towel for signs of movement. She said something about the dough needing to rise, a phrase I did not understand and did not trust. Rise from where. Rise to do what. I have caught things that move on their own before — moths, a particularly bold beetle in July, my own tail on a bad morning — and none of them needed an hour and a towel to get started. I put my nose right up to the fabric and inhaled and got nothing but flour and cloth and the ordinary smell of the counter underneath, but I stayed anyway, because something under there was apparently doing work, and I intend to be present for work being done in my kitchen whether or not I understand its nature.
When she finally lifted the towel I was right there, closer than she expected, and we both looked into the bowl at the same time. It had gotten bigger. Not dramatically, not like a bird suddenly filling a window, but bigger, pale and smooth and slightly domed, like it had taken a breath and was holding it. I took one step back without deciding to. She laughed again, softer this time, and told me it was supposed to do that, which did not help me even slightly.
She pressed one finger into it and the little dent stayed there a moment before filling back in on its own, and that was the detail I could not get past. Things that hold the shape of a touch and then quietly erase it are, in my experience, either alive or haunted, and I have no evidence this kitchen has ever hosted a haunting, so I filed it under alive and treated it with the appropriate caution for the rest of the afternoon.
Then it went into the oven, which I had opinions about immediately. The oven door, closed, puts out a particular kind of heat through the glass that is different from the vent in the hallway — steadier, a little damp at first and then drying out, and entirely mine to monitor from the floor directly in front of it. I lay down there with my chin on my paws and watched the dark shape behind the glass very closely for a while, in case it tried anything.
It did not try anything. It just got browner. Eventually the whole kitchen filled up with a warm, yeasty smell that was related to the earlier flour smell but rounder, and she started moving around the kitchen humming to herself in a way that had nothing performed about it, just the sound a person makes when something is going right.
When it finally came out, she set it on a wire rack to cool and told me, with real seriousness, that I was absolutely not to touch it, which felt unnecessary since I had no plan to put my mouth anywhere near something that had so recently been inside a hot metal box doing whatever it had been doing. I did, however, sit directly beneath the rack for the better part of an hour, monitoring it from below in case it needed anything.
Later, after she’d cut into it and the kitchen smelled like warm crust and something faintly sweet underneath, I found a stray patch of flour she’d missed by the baseboard, dried into a thin crust of its own, and sat in it for a while just to keep my paw white a little longer.