The dust that collects in our vacuum cleaner is full of cat and human hair, dead skin, lost lego pieces, cut up bits of paper and scraps of childrens’ creativity, feathers from the cushions that line our sofa, sweet wrappers dropped, mud from the souls of our shoes stamped inside and lots of other undefinable grey. Grey forms into a tight fluffy nest. An accumulation of our collective detritus, our unwanted fragments and shedded selves.
I have begun to make our family dust into bread.
As I mix the dust with flour, yeast, salt, oil and water it gathers in my throat, it tastes foul, it forms an ugly ball of sludgy dough. The dough is tough and gritty to knead and it scratches the skin on my knuckles.
The dough rises slowly under a tea towel resting near the warmth of our radiator.
Baking in the oven it smells sweet, turned out it is as heavy as a brick.
Our waste has weight.
Syd arrives home from school, looks at the sliced up dust bread sitting on the table and says “Do we have to eat that mum” ?
“No darling, Pierro Manzoni, never ate his shit so we most certainly do not need eat our own dust bread ” I reply
I do wonder what our own dust bread taste’s like though, and I think about the texture of the bread, the pieces of foil caught within the dough and how they would catch the metal of filled teeth and how the hair would cling to the throat and what it would look like after it had been digested.
