I stood underneath the yellowed glow of the oven light that radiated from the central well of my kitchen cabinetry, a door left ajar and its inside housing the only light globe in my kitchen that hadn’t burnt out.
Plight, it seemed, was to be my enviable decor.
A stark kitchen, devoid of both plate and saucer, bore not even the fruit of a cockroach’s chance of survival. A landscape of formlessness that shys past the word barren and evokes the feeling of nakedness within a room: a feeling that no amount of dust could ever cover.
Contemplating the morning ahead, I briefly looked to the small section mold that obstinately lingered upon my tile’s grout line and watched it wax and wane along the kitchen sink, I grew lost in this culture, an ingrained fauna evolving from a lackadaisical cleaning regime; suddenly I wondered if this thriving mold was privy to more daily nutrition than I was…
Wallowing in my breakfast tradition of lacking the cognition to bother with crockery, I overcooked two slices of toast and brushed a knife against an exhausted punnet of butter.
When did I last by bread?
The soft tinkle of crumbs downward had caused the huntsman that lived in my sink to propel himself from the drainhole and run a full lap of the basin in panicked gallop; I had recently begun to suspect this hairy arachnid of suffering from a form of partial anxiety, as even the apparent smallest of intrusions into his home would cause him to visibly tremble and then sheepishly retreat to the safety of his S-bend–in stark defiance to both his name and his nature.
The huntsman, at some point in his cowardice laden lifetime, had lost a leg to some unknown conflict and, with this handicap, would be seen to clumsily limp in listing arcs whenever he alighted from his S-bend, tripping and stumbling as he attempted not to slip upon the metal surface of the sink.
I had once seen him fretfully try to clamber along the tap head above and take freight about halfway into his journey; freezing in motion for almost two hours, it was not until I made a small ramp with a wooden spoon that he gathered enough courage to slink downward into the safety of his sink.
Launching himself bodily at one of the fallen crumbs, the huntsman became a coil of thrashing limbs and uncoordinated movement, rolling in a tangle as he skated over a stray droplet of butter and careened headlong into an abandoned scourer.
Righting himself and finding the crumb to be devoid of nutrition, the seven legged huntsman visibly sighed and then wandered over to a scrap of steel wool, laying down and gently bopping the metallic bud with his remaining front leg.
Later in the day, when he had finished his sulk, I decided to drop a sultana into the sink for him, I usually did this whenever my little friend needed a bit of win, or sometimes just in an meek attempt to stop him from being afraid of flies.
Coffee.
What do I doeth to you in my sleep that should make me miss you so each morning?
Boiling the kettle I detached myself from the sink and went in search of my favorite mug–archeologists bring thy best scrabbing brush…
There were other mugs–maybe–but within the labyrinth of crockery and fell spirits that constituted my kitchen cupboard, nothing was to be trusted fully.
A flower pot with curious handle, a snooker trophy from before I was born; I don’t remember buying these artifacts of another life, but today their purpose exists as only a current mystery of present disinterest.
Moving a bundle of unfolded tea-towels to the bench I stumbled upon a mug-shaped waif of porcelain pocketed by a dusty heritage and corralled by several jam jars that may never know jam.
A vessel, yes, and one that would probably be good enough for the immediate need of caffeination, but the weight of this replicant would be wrong, its grip may feel off as I would lift it upward and to see the small ripples of dust break the surface, blobbing upward as if they were the jettisoned cargo of a ship, one consumed by the sea and lost eternal in a dark ocean of instant coffee.
Stirred by the passing warmth of a morning breeze I stepped through the frame of long lost flyscreen and out to the verandah, its weathered floorboards rough against my feet and swaying with a slight bounce as the nails, like so many other things in my home, had become misplaced.
Next door I could hear the faint click of a plate being washed and the buzz of a radio, warbling noisily over the morning static, it was speaking of tax, the news and possibly the weather in some far off country town.
I had stopped listening to the radio recently as I had stopped owning a radio recently.
It seemed that I had stopped owning quite a lot in the past months as so many things in my life had suddenly become displaced…
Only now, with this reflection, did I notice that I had been robbed…possibly several times.
Hmm.
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 