As this odd, slim work opens, an unnamed narrator is contemplating the biscuit he’s preparing to eat. He gazes at its appearance, runs over in his imagination its possible delights, anticipates its joys in indulgent detail: “I studied it in the way one might study a photograph of a stranger’s face—not for beauty, but for character,” the narrator thinks. “It had none of the uniformity of factory-born pastries, none of the glossy, symmetrical perfection that exists to lure you at a glance.” Rather, this biscuit is homemade and presumably one of a kind—something to be treasured before it’s consumed. The narrator spends a good number of pages cherishing it until his musings are interrupted by the sound of a phone ringing. It’s probably a telemarketer or some other such nuisance, but does the narrator dare to distract his attention from the biscuit? “If ever a baked good could exude an air of quiet satisfaction, this was it.” After finally eating the biscuit and finding it dry, the narrator contemplates what might have happened if he’d drizzled honey on it as a moisturizer—but that would present dangers of its own if the honey dripped too fast, he thinks. As the narrator moves on to the prospect of baking his own biscuit, he begins talking to himself: “I feared the void,” he says aloud. “But now…here I stand, with something vaguely biscuit-shaped in hand.” As the story progresses in its weird, nearly delusional level of rapt concentration, Davis works hard to invest his readers in the mini-drama of a good biscuit: the anticipation, the consumption, and the baking. He cannily uses dramatic language (“I could see it: that perfect version of myself pulling the tray from the oven”) in order to color a story of “a biscuit worthy of folklore.” As such, the storytelling is unquestionably passionate. Obviously, readers’ results will vary depending on how excited they are by pastry, since the biscuit is, in essence, the entire book.