The city smells like burnt toast at 5:30 a.m.

I just came off shift, standing under a streetlamp that’s been flickering since last winter. The air’s sharp with cold and something else—burnt bread, maybe? Or the ghost of a kitchen fire from a building I passed earlier. I keep thinking about how every city has a smell at dawn, and this one’s got a nervous edge to it. Like the whole place is holding its breath before someone turns on the first coffee machine.