When she lifted the cutter, the dough tore awkwardly. It left behind an unrecognizable lump with jagged edges.
“It does not work,” Marcus said. “It just rips the edges.”
“It has to mean something,” Clara said.
She looked at the torn dough, then at the lopsided tool. Throwing it away felt like discarding a piece of a puzzle she was supposed to solve.
“Maybe it is a map,” Marcus murmured, his thumb returning to his screen.
Clara picked up the cutter and wiped the sticky dough from its edges with a damp cloth.
She knew her holiday routine was supposed to be simple and predictable, yet this small piece of steel had disrupted the entire morning. If she threw it away, she felt she might lose something important.
She walked to the kitchen table and cleared away the rolling pin and the flour sifter.
Clara placed the strange metal shape in the center of her clean kitchen table.
The fluorescent lights of Miller’s Hardware hummed directly over the wall of kitchen gadgets. Clara held the strange metal cutter against a row of standard, circular biscuit cutters hanging from neat metal pegs.
