Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The previous tenant left a single spoon in the second drawer, tarnished where the thumb must have rested for years. I keep it there, a small black tongue beside the strangers' forks.

Morning enters the way light always enters a rented room — sideways, surprised by its own arrival, falling on the chipped enamel of a kettle that knows nothing of me yet and may never learn.

I set the kettle down. I open windows. The radiator clicks like a metronome keeping time for some other century's song. On the sill, a ring of salt where someone once placed a glass and forgot it overnight.

I am learning the language of this room slowly: how the floor groans near the threshold, which cupboard sticks in summer, where the light gathers at four o'clock and refuses to leave, patient as an animal waiting to be fed.

By evening I have made it almost mine. The spoon stays in its drawer. I do not move it. Outside, the city exhales its long blue breath, and somewhere, in another borrowed kitchen, someone is opening a drawer and finding me.