If you brought this book home with you, you’re finally ready to up your game in the kitchen. Maybe you’ve long been tempted to take the plunge. Maybe you’ve almost started this journey before but got cold feet. Either way, you’ve had it. Enough is enough! It’s time to overcome your fear of one of nature’s greatest gifts to the home baker: yeast. 

[A picture of freshly baked bread sitting prettily on top of a pink napkin on a wooden butcher’s block, crust broken open to reveal a gaping slit of its insides.]

Before you read on and expand your horizons, you’ll need to know a couple of things. 

1. There’s a reason so many cultures (pun intended) use bread in religious practice. Baking bread is an act of transfiguration and resurrection.

[Another picture. Closer on the stretched, spongy, whorled surfaces of the loaf’s guts, its perforations and caverns, its softness, its unexpected spaces.] 

2. Thus, to bake bread is to become Dr. Frankenstein. Yeast is alive! 

[A third: The bumps that stipple the outer layer of the bread’s tempting crust, a delicate membrane threatening to crack if touched. In closeup, they look sharp, like little needles.]

3. This is a life you’re tending, baker. Treat your starter like a friend or lover. Give her what she needs. 

[A fourth: Blurry almost, up-resolution making its details alien, the blooms of white sandiness on top of it all, like clouds in still skies. Is it flour? A byproduct of the baking process? Is it supposed to look like that?]

Something about this image draws you in. You shift the book in your hands, run your fingers over the slick surface of the picture. 

A fragile slip of paper, agitated by your interest, slides out from between the pages. It falls into your lap. 

Holding it by its edges, you read:

Every two months, like clockwork, it grows inside me. Bodyclock gone awry, like the bloodshedding of my guts was an engraved invitation. Like sex with another person is always an orgy—fucking millions of tiny others. 

I used a condom. The doctors tell me I must be doing something wrong. Then they tell me my body is the one making the mistake, with no help from my mind or their cock. It’s like that story—you know the one. When I itch, should I say, “I itch,” or “my pussy itches”? Where do “I” end, and the cavern that splits me in half, the one I never notice until it’s swollen shut like the flu, reducing me to a doglike state, dying to reach up and tear everything asunder, begin? 

It grows. It’s growing. I take the little pink pills, the ones that crumble when I push them out of their paper-then-plastic package. I swallow them, then wait. “If symptoms don’t improve, take every seventy-two hours.” But I know it’s growing anyway. I’ve become a gardener unto myself, watering the tomatoes, tilling the soil, clawing desperately at the beds for weeds with clumsily gloved hands.

Yeast rises. That’s its imperative: this magic ingredient that makes things swell and puff up, full of holes. It’s invaded me in places I think of as closed, or open for business at my discretion. I push the little white capsule up inside myself with two fingers, feeling every newly unfamiliar inch like sandpaper, touching my insides without pleasure, the realization they’re not just mine but me. My self made tangible in a way that no sex has ever concretized. 

Sex is smooth. This is labor. Quick and dirty like someone else prying, invading without consent. It’s invading. They. Millions and millions of tiny fungi. Not weeds after all, my gardening moot. 

A fungal infection isn’t like a bacteria. Something about the fact of fungus—the fact that we live in symbiosis with a family of mushroom-like bodies all the time, unfeelingly, only becomes unsettling when they become too comfortable—make themselves known. 

I am their home. A home has no say in how it’s lived in. Couches moved around, a new paint job, an ugly picture hung on the wall. I am a husk full of cathedrals made of germs. Mycelia can’t be hoed or pulled. Their network is infinite, intuitive. I bomb myself with gynecological pesticides. Tear plastic packages. Push suppositories up the shaft with plastic applicators like an alien insemination, insect shells glistening.

I imagine the baby I might have with my yeast. Parthenogenetic miscreant microbiome bastard. She drags herself out of my vaginal canal, nipping at me with crumbly, flakey teeth that send shivers of discomfort up the root of myself. She’s yellow and sticky, covered in rotten cheesy discharge. She smells like fish. Her face is swollen, painful, puffy like good bread. The skin of her arms is bumpy. She opens her mouth to scream but thick slime rolls out. The only sound she can make through her thick labial orifice is a gassy queefing sound. I’ve always thought Candida would make a great baby name if it weren’t so fucking disgusting. 

I want to drag myself along the ground like a dog, pussy raw in the dirt. I want to use a cheese grater on myself all the way to my cervix like Patrick Bateman. I want to turn myself all the way inside out then take a hot shower. 

If this goes on long enough, maybe the yeast will escape the confines of my reproductive organs (it does make some sort of sense that my animals would take root there, fucking and multiplying until they overtake even myself, outnumbering my cells, turning me to bread). I picture my tongue a formless white fuzz. My blind eyes cloud with chunky, foetid gelatin. My skin crusts, flakes, breaks out in sebaceous sores. I begin to rot without disguise. My skin peels back. I begin to curl all the way open, pinkly. 

You have smeared the last lines with the oil your skin makes, pulpy paper sucking up your juices, incorporating you into its recipe. The page is wrinkled, the final Y sliding its shadow towards you, warping in the cracks and folds of the sheet’s vulnerable membrane. 

You set the note gingerly aside, slipping it back into the index of your new cookbook. Deep breath. 

Where were you? 

[Another glossy picture: A charcuterie board next to fat slices of soft baguette. Blue cheese ribbed with veins of good rot, slimycrumbling delicious, potent. Cottage cheese slick. Parmesan hard and yellow. Salami and prosciutto in slippery, yonic folds.] 

With these carbohydrate commandments in hand, just remember: Don’t be afraid! 

Yeast is perfectly natural, a miracle even. Once you learn to play by her rules, a whole new world will open up. You’re a sorceress with a new spell under your belt. Loaves will rise at your command. You have this power inside you already. 

Are you ready, baker?