Kitchen Requiem

Moonlight banked off the clouds, sending pearly shivers of light through the kitchen windows. It tousled the leaves of the wilted herbs, planted in rectangular pots along the windowsill, sending skeletal shadows across the linoleum floor. 

Andrea crept across the kitchen. She could smell mint in her quiet breaths that disturbed the silence of the kitchen; the sort of silence that tugged your ribs uncomfortably into your lungs. She moved slowly around the highchair, her feet cold despite her socks, trying dearly not to wake the others in the house. Her family were light sleepers at the best of times. 

The kitchen never felt like it belonged to her in the liminal witching hours. There was a digital presence that gained an unwieldly sentience in the darkness. Time had difficulty existing here: at the bench, the microwave blinked 00:01 in grey monochrome. Below it, the dishwasher asserted 23:43. Across the marbled counter, the oven dial winked 07:32 in crisp white numbers. She recognized the morse - Long-long. Long-long. M. M. - as if it was matching the fridge's undercurrent, whining softly in the darkness. She was outnumbered here, but it only felt apparent in the in-between times of the night. She let out a quiet sigh, joining their binary chorus.

She checked the time on her phone. The screen arced a burst of color across the room. Andrea squinted past the picture of her family posing by a mountain range: Noah was about to start kindergarten, Amelia balanced on her hip, Ryan acting as photographer so he could avoid being in the photo. She blinked suddenly. On the phone screen, it was 1:49. It ruled over the other blinking dials here. She dropped her phone in her dressing gown pocket.  

Avoiding the creaks beneath the linoleum, she moved towards the kitchen windows. Her shadow trailed and mixed with the fragile herb branches. She liked it out here this late: a sole, barely-welcome guest of the appliances that winked in morse. She treasured it, even, like having the last golden Ferrero Rocher in the entire box. She could submerge herself in the fantasy that it was any time... She shot a glance to the door of the kitchen. Asleep, she reminded herself. They were just dreaming, and Amelia was finally done having nightmares about Shaun the Sheep. 

The fridge stopped humming. She looked to it; at its vaguely grey rectangles she knew were magnets to commemorate their travels as a family. At eye-height there was a photo of the children: Amelia leaning back onto her older brother with a gummy smile glued to her face. There wasn't a photo of her camera-shy husband. If she really focused on that photo in the darkness, she could see a slither of his thumb in the top-left corner. She moved her thumb over the waxy paper. She wished she’d taken more shots of him incognito: playing Legos with the kids, kicking soccer balls for Noah to chase in his tiny metal-studded boots, maybe one of him carrying her a tray laden with teas and biscuits in bed when she was ill, or tired. 

Andrea yawned widely as she reached for the thermos, nestled neatly between the jug and microwave. Arranging this was routine now, as much of her nightly routine as gargling mouthwash, and checking on the kids’ rooms before heading to bed. She twisted the thermos open. Steam wafted out gently catching on the strands of moonlight, as if the tousles of steam were breaking free from a particularly tall witches' cauldron.  

She fished a mug out of the dishwasher, ignoring its admonishing beep, and opened the cupboard, looking to the darkened contents and boxes of half-used herbal teas. She picked one at random, tossed the tea-bag into her mug, and poured hot water over it. 

Everything was a shade of greyscale here, as if the real world had been photocopied, leaving this pale copy that she inhabited, with its grey thermos, and dark, spotted mug, which now smelt of stale raspberry or chamomile. She wrapped her fingers around the mug, warming them to almost uncomfortable temperatures, and took a slow sip. Definitely raspberry. One that she’d been trying to slog through after opening it a few months ago. Too tart. Too sour. She fished the tea bag out with her fingers, biting down a hiss as the hot water singed her fingertips.  00:07 blinked gray on the microwave. 

Outside the window, Andrea watched the world. Infrequent yellow rectangles of light illuminated windows down the street. Black swathes of darkness claimed the spaces of familiar trees. They moved softly in the gentle wind.  Rooves – corrugated iron - reflected silvery moonlight back to the air. A large moon hung at attention in the sky, waning a little each night as she treated with it. The appliances, the moon, and her. Cleaning, cooling, cooking, growing and shrinking. A silent recurring masque for them all to play in. The mug did not get a part, she had decided weeks ago. It had no responsibilities of its own to maintain. She toyed with a piece of mint on the windowsill, bending it gently backwards at the stem. It snapped as if made of glass. She filled a cup with cool water, and watered the plants apologetically, unsure when she’d last done so. Unwilling to touch the rest, lest they shatter.  

Disturbing the monochrome melancholy of the kitchen, she looked at the photo on her phone again. It had been taken shortly before Ryan had driven the kids to get ice-cream at a nearby dairy. Andrea flinched softly as the fridge resumed its humming, and moved to sit on one of the bar stools on the facing the door to the rest of the house. It was silent. Nearly loud enough for her to pretend for a little longer, that everyone was just asleep in their beds. That in a few hours, Amelia would be in her high-chair smearing breakfast oats zestfully across her face, that Noah would swing on the bar stools until getting scolded, that Ryan would kiss her gently before they left for work. 

She despised the macabre part of herself that was counting down the time until she woke the next night, unaware in her exhaustion that she was alone in the house. The memory temporarily buried, that her family hadn't survived the trip to get ice-creams. It was 23:59. And 00:26. And Boxing Day, 2023. And 04:52. She abandoned the mug by the sink, and fled back through the house.