It felt like there was a draft in the room. The windows were old and that was probably why it felt like the cool autumn air was seeping inside the cozy walls of the house.

He wanted to nestle deeper into his mess of blankets, but the cold air continued to nip at his nose, and he heard the shout coming from the hall.

"Ben! Breakfast! Wake up sleepy head!"

And with that, he groggily pulled the blankets off from around his body and slipped out from under the quilted sheets.

"Coming!" He yelled, struggling to pull on his shoes and slip a sweater over his bony little shoulders.

And once he had finished clothing himself, he rushed out of his bedroom and down the staircase as fast as his feet could carry him. Awaiting him at the bottom was a scene quite different from most mornings.

"Good thing it's a Saturday, sleepy head," is what his mother would usually say to him on Saturday mornings, while setting the table with a home made breakfast like no other.

But instead it was his father. His bowl of cornflakes in front of him, and a smaller bowl, just across the table from his.

"Dad, where's Mom? Why isn't she making breakfast?"

He lowered the newspaper he had been reading and looked up. "Don't worry, Benji. Mother wasn't feeling well, it's nothing to get worked up about."

Sitting down, he began to stir the spoon around in his cornflakes, watching them swirl round and round in the vortex of milk until the flakes evened out and the liquid was still. It was kind of like the ideal life. You get sucked into it and you have to get yourself straightened out, but in the end you'll find still waters, and like the flakes, things will just seem to even out.

Then again, most people journey through several milk vortexes. Metaphorically Speaking, of course. Maybe it was impossible to have the ideal life. Maybe it was impossible to have a steady and balanced life. But what did he know? It's not a boy's job to figure out the bumps and twists in the road of life, he's got more important things to do. At the moment, eating cornflakes was one of them.

It's been a while, he realized, since we've had cornflakes.

It's been even longer, trying to imaging the last time it was Dad making breakfast, and not Mother.