Here you are in the bowels of the house. Against the odds, you made it. No idea how many doors you slipped through, how many rooms you tunnelled to reach this point. Swaying on your heels, breath lurching in your stomach, here you are: coming apart at the foot of a well-hidden kitchen. Blinds of war-proof felt block out a pair of long windows and the only glow comes from a lamp that reminds you of a mantis. Carrots in a beautiful bowl next to some roasted legs, obscene in the green light. Your stomach gripes as you inhale. Fumble Mindy’s cigar between your fingers, to keep yourself in.

About now you notice: six candles on the candelabra; five cold, one still smoking. You didn’t expect company. You stick a nail into the warm wax and cast your gaze around the room. A knife quavers in the chopping board. A strawberry, not long from the fields, lies half-bitten on a napkin. Sweetness rolls through the shut-in air and you soon sniff out a cake in the oven. Someone has left fresh proof of themselves. 

Today’s newspaper bites on a stool. You skate over the cream of the morning stories. A coup following a terrible flood. Terrible; terrible. Look at you, trying to care: you can see Mindy smirking at you. You let her cigar fall back into the depths of your pocket and hold the paper in both hands, but you’re very aware of your own show and the more you read, the more you hear Mindy scoff. You don’t care about these things; she knows and you know it. What you care about are the greasy finger-marks on the tips of the newspaper pages. Still tacky. More proof. You stop reading, sit on the stool, and close your eyes, remembering all the times you and Mindy fought—you’re so insincere! Nobody wants your pretence!—and you start feeling the fire in your belly. But very suddenly, it doesn’t matter. 

Out of the kitchen’s silence comes a small, stammering exhale. You open your eyes. The cellar door, six feet from where you stand, shuts-to.

You can just make out a wet eye, blinking at you from the slot of dark, before the door slams and footsteps streak out of hearing. You roll the newspaper into a baton, a flurry of something—excitement?—raising you from the stool, readying you on your heels to chase this intruder because they were not invited, to bake and read, and you’re hot at the cellar door before you can think.

The oven timer chimes. You stop. Invited. The word trips a hair in your brain. Invited?

What it could mean to be invited here eludes your every effort. In fact, as you try to think it, the more you feel something else rifling about you: the heat, the savagery, the heavy, hemmed-in air. The hang of the rot is getting to you. You can see why they left in a hurry. This room wasn’t built for baking or reading, or even daylight. A horror should you try to open a window. You look around the kitchen: it wouldn’t survive. It’s too affected, too deep and dark. 

Invited. You picture the extension of an arm, hand. You imagine taking it, being led by it, and you know, instantly, what it would be like. An insistence: melt into the furniture and rest forever. You consider the alternative of the outside: fanfare, fighting over a view, being devoted to things, surrendering to them. The kitchen cloaks and soothes it all.

You do as instructed. Throw the cake in the sink. Kick the newspaper under the table. Pull the wires from the mantis and smash that candle right out. The darkness is the softest thing your head has ever felt. But just as your legs start to swim with the possibility of releasing into the balmy dark, a face spills into view. Mindy, oh! you sigh. You watch her frown over a big book. You feel, acutely, her smile, her smoke. You yank the cigar from your pocket and light it up, and your heart is off the floor, and suddenly you desperately miss the surface. Your lungs feel bright and cold and used. Alive! The feeling of bombs falling in your chest. This was a mistake. Quickly: back the way you came! You can still hear something good growing in the wet air outside, through the miles of wall and curtain. You make a half-turn from the kitchen, resolute, when the stove bursts to life and the table burnishes red and soft like the best bed you’ve seen.