It’s quiet in the still frame of air-conditioned mid-July, in the white-washed walls that smell like fresh paint, in the echoed hum of five-hundred unfurnished square feet.
While you sleep on a king-sized mattress in the next room I lay the mushrooms carefully in a pan, two inches apart so that they do not cry and become waterlogged and grey with proximity.
They sizzle to brown crisps and I wake you gingerly with coffee. We eat on the floor in the pale light of afternoon.
I cook rice that evening. My mother tried to teach me how to make each grain full and soft and entact, but I never listened, rushing ahead to a boil and now each grain is a broken ball of glue, burned black in the bottom of the pan and in the next room there is a mattress and a cup of cold coffee
Grace Willis studies English Literature at Missouri State University in the Ozarks of Missouri. She has previously published work in Novus Literary Journal as well as Roadrunner Review.
