1. Memory
The bed, if one could call it that, is hard and narrow. She shifts gingerly to her side, mindful of muscles sore and tense from the night.
She has slept, an hour or two, the kind of sleep that steadily walks the fine and flimsy line between the conscious and unconscious, which is hardly what you'd call sleep because you never really are.
Never asleep. Not quite awake.
A memory, recent and lucid, finds her unguarded, too tired to resist: of soft cushions, white linens and deep sleep.
And her waking up to the smell of something burning.
Let me in
To see you in the morning light.
"You should've woken me up."
"Good morning to you, too." He smiles, but doesn't look up at her. Instead, he continues flipping over what appears to be pancakes. Burnt, irregularly-shaped, oversized pancakes.
She tries but fails to suppress a laugh.
"Do you even know what you're doing?," she says, leaning on the doorframe, arms crossed over her chest, and head tilted to the side for effect.
Sunshine filters from the open door, into the kitchen but not before it outlines her form like an apparition crowned in gold light and he's compelled to stop and look. She looks refreshed, light, like a hopeful bubble of morning dew.
Remarkably, he remembers to speak. "They're pancakes, Kate. Can't be that hard."
"And yet somehow you manage to make it that hard," she retorts, eyeing the heap of mess on the counter; eggshells, flour, batter and such. She saunters into the kitchen and takes the stool across him.
He purses his lips in a sheepish grin. "Well, they were all rather uncooperative about the whole thing. The eggs, especially so. But we talked it out," he's able to say with a straight face. He flips the last pancake on the pile in the plate and hands it to her.
"You don't mind your pancakes to be a bit crunchy, do you?," his eyes dancing in mock and mirth.
She leans over the counter, elbows propping her up, and gives him a peck on the cheek. "Oh no, that's just the way I like 'em."
"Good." He's beaming at her, that wide and absorbing smile. "Next time, I'll try to go easy on the crunch."
"Yeah, next time," she says, a ghost of a smile upon her lips, an apparition about to disappear.