Portside

The Model Bakery
By Michelle Elvy
While the rest of the world turned on its access and went to war and declared peace and went to war again and declared peace again and eventually engaged a new kind of war, a war that would last generations and be final proof that we’d all gone mad, while the socialists and communists and fascists and capitalists and anarchists and pacifists and economists and existentialists and astrologists and ufologists and scientists and homeopathists and nanotechnologists and nihilists and objectivists and evolutionists and creationists and occupy-ists advanced theories on progress and history and movement and change and a better life and a worse life and the end of the world and the new age, as well as the benefits of vitamin C and the dangers of gluten, the baker in Palmerston North, like his father and grandfather before him, pulled the shutters up on a new day and hung the wooden sign in the window: THE BREAD NEVER VARIES
Michelle Elvy is a writer, editor and manuscript assessor. She edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Blue Five Notebook. She is also Assistant Editor for the Best Small Fictions series and is currently editing an anthology of New Zealand short forms with James Norcliffe and Frankie McMillan (Canterbury University Press 2018). Her fiction, poetry, travel stories, creative nonfiction and reviews have been widely published and anthologised.  She can also be found judging numerous competitions (most recently Bath Flash Fiction Award) and is chair of New Zealand’s annual National Flash Fiction Day.  More at michelleelvy.com.