The House Rearranges the Kitchen at Night

It started so gently that I gaslit myself for months. A mug I'd left handle-left would be handle-right. Chairs I'd leave pulled out — I'm a leave-it-out person, my late husband was a push-it-in person, and this matters — would be neatly pushed in by morning. The fruit bowl migrated an inch or two along the counter. Each individual thing was deniable. I denied them all, for a season, because the alternative was unbearable and also, frankly, because the corrections were things HE would have done. My husband tidied the way other people breathe.

He died two years ago. I live alone, in the house we shared, and I am not a fanciful woman — I ran a laboratory for thirty years; I believe in controls and confounds.

So I ran controls. I photographed the kitchen each night before bed. I marked the fruit bowl's position in pencil. I put a single dried lentil balanced on the door handle to the hall, a tell-tale that would fall if anyone passed. The photographs caught the changes — mug rotated, chair tucked, bowl moved to its 'correct' spot two inches over — and the lentil never once fell, and the doors stayed locked, and I live alone, and the changes kept coming, gentle and domestic and unbearably familiar.