Ferment

Before you knew it was happening, the grain had already begun its slow undoing— spores settling like unanswered questions into warm water, darkening. The small mouths do not ask permission. They eat brightness and exhale, cloud the glass with their exhaling, turning simple sugar into song. What survives the dark learns patience not from stillness but from labor— by morning, bubbles at the lip, the jar faintly warm against your palm, alive with its invisible cargo. You lift the cloth and lean in. First the sourness finds you, then something beneath it, almost floral, almost bread—the wild yeast having turned the world a quarter turn.