Tuesday

june 12, 2026

The window is open and the kettle is not yet boiling. You are not waiting for the kettle. You are standing near it because the kitchen is the warmest room and because the cat has taken the chair you usually sit in and there is no point arguing with the cat.

You are barefoot. The tiles are cold. It is the kind of cold that is interesting on the bottom of your feet for the first ten seconds and then is just the actual temperature of the floor.

Outside someone is mowing a lawn. Not yours. Someone four houses down maybe, you cannot tell. The sound comes in pieces because the wind keeps turning it on and off like a hand against a switch.

You think: I will move my feet when the kettle whistles.

You think: I will move my feet in a minute.

You do not move your feet.

There is a fly on the rim of the sugar bowl. You watched it land and you have not yet decided what to do about it. The fly does not appear to be doing anything wrong. It is on the rim. It is not in the sugar. There is a moral category here that does not have a name. You are too tired to invent one.

The kettle ticks. Not whistles. Ticks. The way metal does when it is thinking about being hot. You have heard a man on the radio describe this as the kettle making up its mind. You did not like the man on the radio but you stole his sentence anyway, the way you steal sentences from people you do not like, which is most of how language works.

You think about the cat. The cat is asleep in your chair. The cat will not move. You do not really want her to. You want, in a small and embarrassing way, for her to wake up on her own and come find you. You want this in the way you want a thing you know perfectly well is not going to happen. You are also a little proud of her for not coming. She has correctly understood that the chair is more reliable than you are.

The lawnmower stops. The whistle the wind has been turning on and off is just gone now, and the room goes a degree quieter, and you can hear the kettle thinking about being hot.

You move your feet. One step to the left, one to the right, like a slow ladder, just to get the cold off the same patches of skin for a while. The floor underneath where you were standing is a slightly different temperature than the floor next to it. You have made a small warm shape with your body and you are walking out of it.

The fly leaves the sugar bowl. Where it goes you do not see. Out the window or under the cabinet or up into the ceiling. The wider world claims it without ceremony.

The kettle does not yet whistle.

You are not waiting for anything in particular. You have stopped pretending to be. The reason you came in here was the warmth and the cat in your chair, and both of those are still true. You can stand in a kitchen because you live here.

When the kettle finally goes, it goes quietly at first, a thin sound coming up from underneath the lid before it commits to a whistle. You take it off the burner before it commits.

The cat does not wake up.

if it stayed with you, write to me.