Soon a milky light began to glow in front of me. It started out kind of blobby, almost like a cloud that had floated into the kitchen, but after a minute or two it condensed into the form of a woman. She was younger and prettier than I had expected, with a turned-up nose and a long neck. I don’t know what color her hair or eyes were; she had no color. She wore old-fashioned clothes.

“Better?”

“I think so.”

She returned to her work. “It was vanity did me in,” she said, measuring baking powder into the mix. “I was so proud of my biscuits that I just couldn’t stand it when that awful Dan McCarty moved into town and started bragging that he made the best biscuits in the state. ‘Why, my biscuits are lighter than dandelion fluff,’ he used to say. ‘Apt to float away on the first stiff breeze.’ After a while his proud talk got to me, and I challenged him to a contest.”

“What kind of a contest?”

“A biscuit bake-off,” she said, dumping milk into the bowl. I realized with a start that I had no idea where she was getting her ingredients from. “Both of us to make biscuits, results to be judged by Reverend Zephyr of the Baptist Church.”

“Did you win?”

She was busy working on her biscuits, so she didn’t answer right away. She had turned the dough out onto the counter and was kneading it lightly. After a few minutes she began to pat it out to an even thickness. When it was about half an inch thick, she turned to me and said in a bitter voice, “I lost. I lost and that was the beginning of my downfall. I became obsessed with biscuits. I swore I would make a better biscuit than Dan McCarty or die trying.”

Using the top of the baking powder can, she began to cut the dough into rounds, flipping them off the counter and onto a baking sheet as she spoke.

“We began to have a weekly contest, Dan and I. Every Sunday morning we’d take our biscuits to church, and after the service Reverend Zephyr would try them out. He’d measure them. He’d weigh them. Finally he’d taste them, first plain, then with butter, then with honey. And every Sunday he’d turn to me and say, ‘I’m sorry, Elvira, but Dan’s biscuits are just lighter and fluffier than yours.’”