A flash-adapted novel excerpt from The Fire Eaters
When Rose and Vivien first moved in together, Rose hadn’t cared for cooking or even kitchens in general. She came from a family of Living Room People, people who met on sofas with beers and bowls of popcorn rather than around a table with all the napkins and silverware set out in the appropriate places. So when she came home from her surgery, opened the refrigerator, and broke down weeping over the state of it, she left Vivien dumbstruck. And though Rose’s moods and body soon recovered and returned to normal, her newfound connection to the fridge only ever intensified.
Vivien tried lending a greater hand with the chores, with cooking, dishes, and grocery runs. But after three separate fights (each worse than the last), she finally gave in and gave up; focusing instead on the rest of the house’s duties while Rose dedicated more and more of herself to the kitchen and its bloated, Easter-pink fridge.
Rose filled her refrigerator with all the generosity she wished for in her own body. She lined the shelves with eggs, cheeses, squashes, juices, leafy greens, yogurts, paper-wrapped cuts of beef, and neatly stacked plastic containers of all their leftovers, each carefully dated and labelled. The drawers and shelves were kept immaculate, scrubbed regularly and then soaked in bleach on the last day of every month.
The machine itself had come with the house and was, Vivien guessed, likely just as old. Its door had a tendency to squeak when employed, so every few weeks Rose took care to grease its hinges, opening and closing, opening and closing it till the door whispered like a slipper along wood floors.
Rose had tried to move it to the other side of the kitchen not long after her surgery, but there was simply no space for it. And so the fridge remained where it’d always been, standing alongside a sunny kitchen window that allowed for daily across-the-street glimpses of the neighbor children as they played and laughed and grew.
“It’s only a fridge,” Vivien told her countless times. “That’s it, Rosie. That’s all.”
But Rose never replied to these little pleas and jabs. It wasn’t something she expected Vivien to understand, and so she never bothered trying to explain it.
“C’mon, hon,” Vivien tried again. “Why not give it a rest for the night?”
Rose ignored her easily; she was finished with her evening cleaning anyway.
Standing back in the appliance’s yellow glow, she appraised the cleanliness of its shelves and listened for the bright hum of its functionality. She nodded, pleased with her work. But just before she closed the door, her gaze fell, as it always did, to the brick of empty space along the rightmost wall of the center shelf—a space just wide and just tall enough for the bottles of baby formula they no longer had any use for.
K.C. Mead-Brewer is a writer and editor working in beautiful Baltimore, MD. Her writing appears in a variety of publications, including Cold Mountain Review, Menacing Hedge, SQUAT Birth Journal, and Used Gravitrons. She’s currently working on her first novel—a work of feminist, near-future science fiction—from which “Shelf Space” is excerpted. Mead-Brewer is also a member of the Roving Writers, a small but unbeatable troubling of wild women artists. For more information, visit: kcmeadbrewer.com or follow her on Twitter: @meadwriter
