The Side It Comes From
There is a room at the back of the kitchen that is kept cold on purpose. It has a heavy door with a long handle and a curtain of plastic strips behind it, and everything we will need tomorrow is on its shelves.
High on the back wall a fan runs behind a grille. It runs all the time. There is white on the grille, and it is not like the white on the glass of the case in the morning, which comes on all over and even. This only grows on one side of each bar. It grows out from the side the air comes from, in small feathers, every one of them leaning the same way, as if it were looking for something.
I asked about it. I was told it builds up and somebody knocks it off on Sundays and it comes back.
Nobody had noticed which side. I did not say that I had.
At home the white grows like that too, on the cold ground, toward whatever is feeding it. You can tell which way the air goes by looking at the stones. I had not expected to find it in a kitchen.
I stood in the room with the door pulled to for eleven minutes. When I came out the line had started without me and nobody asked where I had been. I think in a kitchen the cold room is a place you are allowed to go and stand.