Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The kettle hums in a dialect older than the lease, its small steel throat clearing toward a window that frames a sycamore I did not plant. I make tea the way a stranger reads a map— slowly, and with a finger.

Three spoons in the drawer, all left-handed. A whisk gone soft at the wires. The salt in a jar shaped like a saint no one in this house remembers naming, or the saint has forgotten the house.

Someone before me labeled the spice tins in a script that leans like wheat. Cardamom. Fennel. A word I cannot read but trust, because the jar is half-full and the air around it smells like patience.

At dusk the fridge sighs into a long minor key. I eat standing up, the way the previous tenant must have eaten, watching the same square of light cross the same square of floor, inheriting nothing, owing nothing, almost home.