Tasavvur, January 2026
“Bird and Bread” is a clever speculative fiction story told through three interconnected narratives that ultimately reveal how the end of the world was prevented by an unlikely combination of a time-traveling narrator, a pigeon, and a baguette.
The story opens with a mysterious narrator who exists outside normal time constraints, claiming to be a “maverick” who can move freely between past, present, and future. This narrator has witnessed the end of the world—caused when scientists accidentally disturbed a delicate cosmic balance while discovering a particle that could explain life’s mysteries. With less than a second before total destruction, the narrator hatched a plan involving “bird and bread” to prevent catastrophe.
The second section shifts to the perspective of a pigeon who narrates three pivotal moments in its life. The first is a formative encounter with a brioche found in a waste bin, which ignites an obsessive love for bread. The second involves stealing a sesame bun from a shelduck at a lake, creating lasting enmity between the pigeon and all ducks. The third finds the pigeon driven from its rooftop home by vengeful ducks and seeking comfort in a seeded baguette it discovers near a large shiny building. The pigeon falls asleep beside this bread, planning to find a way back home.
The final section presents transcripts from “Ed & Bread,” a YouTube channel where Edhas documents his project of baking all 273 recipes from an obscure cookbook called “Cake Cookie Bread” by the mysterious Gingembre Paine. After losing his job, Edhas impulsively bought this book and became convinced of Paine’s genius. The videos show him methodically making a seeded baguette in his new, smaller apartment, complete with detailed instructions and awkward humor. At the video’s end, Edhas reveals he got a new job at a fancy building but accidentally dropped the baguette near the entrance and fled in embarrassment.
The story concludes with a real news article from PopSci about a 2009 incident at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where a bird dropped bread on outdoor machinery, causing significant overheating that would have triggered automatic shutdowns if the beam had been operational. The article notes the growing pile of “freak accidents” at CERN, making the theory of “time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery” seem increasingly plausible.
The brilliant structure reveals how these seemingly unrelated narratives connect: the time-traveling narrator orchestrated events so that the bread-loving pigeon, fleeing from ducks (which the narrator placed on the pigeon’s roof), would find Edhas’s baguette and later drop it on the LHC machinery, preventing the catastrophic particle discovery. The narrator’s “simple plan” of bird and bread saved the world through an elaborate chain of causation involving a baker’s unemployment, a pigeon’s dietary obsession, inter-species grudges, and perfectly timed coincidences—or rather, carefully orchestrated temporal manipulations disguised as accidents.
Most of Aparna’s friends are imaginary, and she is happiest when she’s making things up. She has been involved in the creation of children’s content in India for over a decade, as an editor and a writer. She has been on the editorial teams of a science magazine, a comic book publisher, and a publisher of picture books. She has also authored picture books and graphic novels, and co-authored a middle grade novel. She has written about children’s literature for various publications, including McSweeney’s and The Hindu, and has presented papers at conferences across the world. She has recently completed a master’s degree in Wild Writing from the University of Essex. She is often found poring over a book or pouring herself a large cup of coffee.