a moment in the day: bounty

Kale, broccoli, walnuts. Jewel-colored carrots so thin I can cut them with scissors. Juice stains the cutting board purple-red. I make coffee and call it all breakfast.

Late-winter six o'clock dark in the apartment, and hand-sewn skirts hang against the walls, white and shadow against white and shadow, like petulant angels with their backs to me. Stephen has made these to wear for photographs so he can get the drapery just right for his lovely paintings of himself in dresses. He's just up, now, and moving around in the bedroom, and if he were to have an impulse to model one of his creations, I'd be hungry for more than just breakfast.

In a moment, he comes into the kitchen wearing PJs and a hoodie. At the wrists of the hoodie hang wide ruffles of white lace [separate, of course, not sewn into the hoodie], also recently made, and he gives me a tiny glance that means he hopes I notice. An eighteenth century nobleman in twenty first century pajamas, reaching to the cutting board for the coffee.