The sunlight had consumed half its way up the road that morning. It grabbed at the cars that whizzed by beneath it. Everything indicated of a world that was recovering from a cold, wet night, but no one thing gave it away so obviously: the air stung with frost, the puddles hardened at the edges, and the hand of the man was completely sealed to the doorknob by ice.

From his beard to the creases in his canvas trousers, these hung in suspended animation, dripping with ice. Only his eyes were permitted to move, and they saccaded the door before him behind a glassy seal. The door was blue, that was for certain, and he had tried over the last few hours to pull from it anything more interesting than that, but no, it was a door, blue, and that was all there was to say about it.

If he rotated his eyes until his muscles strained, he could see the exhausts of the cars pass by. None of them ever stopped. How long had he been like this? He cursed himself for having used his left hand to reach for the doorknob. What was he thinking? Never, has he used that hand for a handle, a kettle, a cup of tea – what convinced him that was a good idea?

His right hand was frozen tight to his side in a vertical position. On its wrist was a blue analog casio, ticking away.

The parking lot he was inside consisted of a phone booth, a forgotten red car, a green grocers that had not figured out the wonky ‘W’ in their sign, and the bakery, with a man glued to its door front. Usually, the bakery did not have such a structure on its door, but this morning was an exception. The man had attempted, driven by a great rumbling of his stomach in the night, to thieve a slice of apple and cinnamon breakfast pie. He was destined to be miraculously unsuccessful for two reasons: first, it was devilishly cold that evening and the doorknob was highly swayed to join in any temperature drops; second, the bakery donated any old pastries at the end of the day to the soup kitchen down the road.

But the man had not known this, and so, donned in a flannels and chattering like a machine, Brug had braved the cold of his car seat, driven half a mile blind due to a frost layer painted over his windscreen, and had carefully manoeuvred his slippers around the slippery puddles. Then he had, with his left hand, seized the doorknob of Guisepe’s Bakes, and that single action had lasted almost five hours now.

Another hour, another quarter of the parking lot consumed by the heat of the sun. The ice died a sprawling, melting death. Any settled dust was chased away. And the warmed air came to eat away the whispy cold ghosts coming from the mouth of Guisepe as he walked through the parking lot. He stopped for a moment to attend to his hands with a few hot gasps, then continued. Usually he opened shop from the front door, but when he got there there was a customer, quite eager. He nodded, and then went around to the side door. Twice he dropped the keys for how their metal felt so much sharper in the cold weather. Guisepe broke a layer of frost that had tightened the door. He awoke the bakery beast – blinked bright its gaping eye windows, started the heart of its oven, and began throwing dough, thickening icings, and communicating with the butter by way of whipping.

Brug finally blinked.

And that was about it. The sun was clean across him, casting and recolouring his saturated outfit into one that oozed a sapphire blue, each individual thread almost brought to life by the ice. He was beautiful – statuesque.

And that was about it.

With the buttery scents came buttery customers, eager to start their day with buttery energy. Guisepe’s parking was the only tarmacked region that did not smell of combusted gasoline, but of muffins and croissants and those sorts of things. The first few customers had come to the door, found Brug, smiled a little, and then went through the side door. Soon though, a rather confident couple with an appetite and an impolite arrangement of “excuse me”s and “pardon me”s came through the front door, not for a moment concerned with Brug’s hand being on the doorknob as they, too, opened it. Brug sort of just opened with the door, perfectly suspended entirely on its swing. He did blink a bit in surprise, but that was it and no one saw it.

With Brug’s contribution to the morning agreed upon, more and more customers came in and out the front door, each time greeting Brug with an interesting look.

“What a fascinating new decoration,” one customer, an older lady, mentioned to Guisepe. Guisepe just gruffed and nodded, for that was his part he played in all conversation. The older lady left with three steaming croissants in hand, and their waft passed cleanly under Brug’s nose on the way out. His two nostril holes and the inside of his nose had defrosted a little, and the flaky notes stung sweet memories. A low groan vibrated somewhere inside him.

By eleven, the flow was at its peak, the sun conducting a revitalized community to consume the goods of Guisepe. They marched to and from the small bakery, taking with them purchases of which they would destroy entirely in their maw and put it back to the chaotic state from where Guisepe had elevated it from. Each commenting on the door front, greeted with a Guisepe grunt. Such a stream of custom did hard work on the door, but it was quite used to it. Less so, was the frozen statue of Brug, which had not begun to thaw, but had taken an amount of wear and tear. The eyes of Brug said it all, exacerbated and desperate. Three fingers, shattered by his feet, a large chink in his left foot had taken the ankle, and his hair which had been up all directions because of sleep, was being cut torn away in large chunks.