Entity story · 3 min read · Set in Lindenstrasse ·
A Supper Nobody Wanted
A family on Lindenstrasse stops being hungry. It takes a housing inspector to say why, and a cold stove to end it.
The first night, Marta noticed the quiet.
Not the good kind. The flat on Lindenstrasse was never quiet at six: Jonas dragging his chair, the girls fighting over the one clean spoon, the radio on the sill talking to nobody. That evening she carried the pot to the table and set it down, and the room made no sound at all. When she looked up the four of them were sitting with their hands in their laps, smiling at her, waiting to be told what to do.
“Smells good,” Jonas said. He did not pick up his spoon.
She told herself it was the weather. She ladled. They ate three mouthfuls each, politely, like guests at a stranger's table, and put their spoons down together.
It was on the fourth night that she saw the water.
It lay across the kitchen floor from the stove to the door, clear as a window, to the height of her ankle. The lino under it was dry; she knew, because she put her hand in and took it out dry. In the middle of it, facing the burners with its head tilted, stood a bird.
It was taller than the fridge. Its legs were two long cream-coloured candles, slightly translucent, with a little flame at each knee that did not flicker though the window was open. It was not looking at her. It was looking at the stove the way her mother used to look at a pot, with patient, total attention.
Marta did not scream. She remembers being grateful that nobody was awake to hear her not scream.
She stood in the doorway for what the clock said was an hour. The bird did not move. Her feet were cold. She was, she realised, not hungry. She had not been hungry since Sunday, and the thought of the stew in the pot was like the thought of a letter from a country she had never visited.
In the morning the floor was dry, and Jonas had lost two kilos and was whistling.
She did what people do. She cooked more. She cooked the things the children loved, the ones with sugar, the ones with cheese. She put the plates in front of them and the plates went back to the sink as full as they had come. The girls grew bright-eyed and light and remarkably well behaved. The neighbour downstairs said what a calm house it had become.
It was the housing inspector who made her say it: a thin woman with a clipboard, there about damp, who stood in the kitchen and looked at the dry floor and wrote something and looked at it again.
“I have to put down that there's no water,” she said.
“There's no water,” said Marta.
“But I'm going to write that there is.”
The inspector left. That night Marta did not cook. She turned off the stove, turned off the light, and sat in the dark kitchen with her feet in a flood that was not there, and waited. She was hungry for the first time in three weeks. The pang of it came up through her like a bell.
The heron turned its head and looked at her.
It was a long look. Then it lifted one candle-leg out of the water, and the flame at the knee went out, and it was gone, and the floor was only a floor.
In the morning she made toast. She burnt it. Jonas said it was the worst thing he had ever eaten, and ate two.