Listen to the author reading this story:
For Sunday supper, Brie serves the last helping of silence and thinks, Good riddance. It’s her mother’s recipe and one Brie knows by heart, though her mother never exactly explained it. Never said, Chop your happiness fine. Never said, Simmer your dignity. Brie’s mother always blew softly to cool pride before swallowing, but never said No, or Help, or You’ve crossed a line. Took the spoons she was given and never asked for more; a kiss on one cheek and a hand on the other, and maybe that’s why the bland dinners of Brie’s childhood always ran salty.
Chuck keeps his hands to himself and doesn’t know where the spoons are, prefers to swallow feelings whole or slam them down fast, like shots of vodka. Just as he has for the two months that his life and Brie’s have melted together, Chuck scrapes the bowl (loudly); burps (louder); then leaves the dish on the table, where the bits he’s missed will congeal (again) without a soak and a scrub.
Brie has a prescription cream in her apron pocket to soothe angry knuckles rubbed raw by cleaning Chuck’s messes. But she’s tired of applying it—and done serving silence altogether, now that her mother’s pot is (at last) empty.
“You’ve crossed a line,” Brie says, and hangs her apron up (neatly). When Chuck stomps out of the kitchen and onto the porch, Brie stomps out of the kitchen and into the garden. When Chuck slams the front door behind him, Brie slams the garden gate at her back. When Chuck yells, “I’m sick of this!” Brie yells back, “ME TOO!” When Chuck gives up and stomps back inside, he waits for Brie’s footfalls to follow.
But they don’t.
Just before the room starts spinning, Chuck throws Brie’s apron to the floor in a huff. Her prescription cream tumbles out. He sees the cream now for the first time, sees the fingerprints, the ghosts of Brie’s cream-lathered fingers smudging the counters, the stove, the floor he’ll soon pass out on.
The cream looks expensive. She wouldn’t leave that behind forever...would she? Surely not the cream, surely not the fingerprints. Surely not...him?
Chuck believes in ghosts, not God—but doesn’t trust either yet. What haunts his head in the split second before the linoleum catches him is the prayer he first heard last week, the one Brie’s father never bothered to learn:
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Monday morning, the apron is still crumpled, the cream still abandoned on the floor. And Chuck’s head throbs, but only half as badly as his heart.
When he can stand again, he opens the icebox. Considers what is fresh and what is turning, what they have. And what could be.
Silence is easy to serve. But they’re out.
So Chuck dons the apron. He fills the smooth void of two plates (scrubbed until his knuckles blush) with clumsy pancakes. Returns the apron to its hook. Waits. Hopes the garden gate will creak open soon. Hopes the pancakes stay warm—and the shot glass, empty.
Tracie Renee (she/her) is a librarian, a Publishers Weekly book reviewer, and a BOTN-nominated writer who lives and dreams in sort-of Chicago. Find Tracie in HAD, Orange Blossom Review, on Bluesky (@tracierenee.bsky.social) and at https://linktr.ee/tracie.renee.