Her Kitchen

Her kitchen is not for him. It’s tucked away in the back of the house far from the windows where she can watch his black truck pull up. There she waits, looking at the walls, looking for him, without really seeing the emptiness he left her. The absence fills the kitchen, growing smoggy and thick until she can’t breathe anymore. He confined her there, bound her to their love, clinging to the walls where they shared it.

Her movements in the kitchen are fluid, and repeated; they follow each other becoming one easy motion. Her hands circle, washing inside the porcelain sink filled with soapy water, cracking her open, so that she, sometimes, can fit just right with him. But she knows that his hands were made bloody and hard somewhere else, away from her kitchen floor he sanded just months after they married. Now his roughness is distant from her, smelling more like bar room rot and less like sweet cherry wood floor.

Her kitchen is beloved. It holds her close, flushing her cheeks, and creating her wild curls. And her children, they center there, with her. But they grow, and move more and more into him, stretching their hearts away. This hurts her most now, when her youngest has pulled himself away and into the gruff ways of men. Her little boy has fallen into her husband’s hands. He shoves guns of might into her son’s chubby hands so he can grasp the self-assertion of boyhood. Sometimes her kitchen brings them all back into her love and then, and only then it feels the warmest of all.

The sound of a rusting muffler roars into her kitchen. She listens as the car door slams followed by a stumble that kicks gravel rocks against each other. These noises makes it known to her that he will not twirl her hair around his fingers, but instead will grope her with some sort of whisky breath affection. Her body stiffens, it’s out of place, she is out of place. Here, now, in her kitchen, as if she were somewhere foreign to her, she doesn’t know what to do with herself, she never does anymore.

She’s always afraid right before his return, afraid of what they are and what they used to be and what they can’t be. Then it is all forgotten. He walks up with tired eyes and pulls her close. He wraps himself around her, kissing her forehead as his tear falls. He is never her kitchen.