Dishes

I go to the kitchen to wash the dishes. There is only one sink. I can't wash wine glasses and saucers and coffee cups and forks and knives and a frying pan in one sink. I must separate them. Organize them into flights. So I empty the sink onto the counters, and I stack the plates, and near the plates I situate the frying pan. This will be the first flight. Then I line up the glasses and the yellow coffee mugs. This will be the second flight. Then the silverware - or the metalware - and the knives. Those will be last, because I hate nothing more than washing utensils by hand. All the while the sink is filling to full with hot, soapy water. I dunk the first flight, and take the scrubber, and the debris of meals eaten muddies the water a broth-like brown. Pieces of dried meat sink. Pieces of dried other things float or find stasis. The water is unfit to clean dishes. Flight one finished, I drain the water, and the sink growls as it sucks down the last drink. I clean the sink then refill it with new hot water, pouring orange dish-soap as it fills. The suds rise until there are more suds than there is water. I drop the mugs and cups and glasses into the sink, and they fall with a dull thud.

I'm scrubbing when the slope of West 10th street catches my eye. It is as it ever was, as it ever looked from inside this house, through that square window with the wide wooden blinds. Someone has placed a box on the sidewalk outside the community health center across the street. Someone walking their dog has stopped beside the box, is looking into it, perhaps it holds something worth examining. I haven't seen what's inside. A little black girl wheels down the slope on a plastic tricycle. From the kitchen, where I am finishing flight two, I can hear the squeak of the toy she rides. She is gone. The sink growls down the second flight's dirty water, and I draw more into its basin, pouring more orange soap.

Soon, I will never look out this window again, I think. Flight three will have to wait until I've dried flight two. There's no more space on the drying rack. And I've begun to cry.