A chunk of butter drops into the pan on a low, low heat. Wait for it to melt into an oily pool, before floating in flour, as light and white as clouds that billow, coating surfaces with swoons of powder.
Her old friend, the warm wooden spoon, churns the mixture, under-and-over, round-and-round, until the liquid is absorbed, the mix swollen, desiccated. A splash of milk sizzles and is subsumed, splash, subsume, splash, subsume, splash, consume.
It is so soothing this – the practised movements, the repetition, the cooking-by-numbers comfort of it quelling the corner of her mind that is processing, calculating, doing the math.
The kitchen fills with the scent of nutmeg-warm milk and smoked fish as she begins assemblage – wilted spinach, plump prawns, golden haddock, pebbles of egg, glutinous sauce, topped with mountains of snow-capped mash.
She lifts the dish to slide into the oven - she won’t be able to say later whether she is clumsy and distracted, or angry and intentional - but it falls from her hands slamming onto the door, detonating, exploding on the tiles.
Her face explodes in sympathy.
Titanium tears clatter like spent bullets, wails sever the silence like an air-raid siren, pyroclastic snot floods her nose, mouth, blisters her throat. She gasps for breath, her lungs convulsed as if the air is poisonous. The devastation is boundless, razing.
In ten-minutes time, she will find herself prone amongst the debris – a war-zone of glass, twisted metal, shattered prawn-flesh, pebbles, boulders.
She’ll be calm again, empty, but know what she must do.
In thirty-minutes time, the kitchen will be tidy, curry ordered, repairman booked. In her fingertips she’ll hold a card - grosgrain ribbed, heavy, heavy - bearing the name of a clinic, and a consultant, and a number, which she’ll finally call.
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