Breakfast Time
There are four silent children sitting around the dinner table. You remember having three.
Your thoughts grind with an inarticulately terrified urgency to know which ones – no – to know which one is the fourth – that collapses into absolute stillness when the child to your left grabs a knife. Everything in the world that’s not the knife stops until the child uses it to cut a piece of bread and then puts it back on the table.
Time releases its breath. Not that one. Maybe.
(There are four silent children sitting around the dinner table. You are no longer sure how many children you have. It could be none.)