Set the forks, Lou.”

My mother opens the drawer on her way to the oven, pulls it hard enough for the cutlery to clatter loudly. Ma loves emphasis.

“Right,” I mumble in response. The word comes out corroded, as if I’ve just woken up.

Hannah comes into the kitchen, wrinkles her nose at the sight of the mashed potato-meatloaf amalgamation cooling on the counter. “Where’ve you been?” she asks me.

I shrug, nod toward the open drawer. “Set the forks.”

As I head into the dining room I hear her mutter, “Just forks.”

Something close to laughter wells up inside of me and I spin around, searching her face to see if I’d heard correctly. That’s the thing with hermit life; there’s a lot of doubt, on account of the whispers trickling down the walls, murmuring from the furniture, whole conversations from the trees outside my window. These days I can’t trust myself to differentiate between wishful thinking and actual sound. I’ve lost my bearings. Fourteen years old, and I can’t find my bearings, nor do I know what bearings are exactly, but my grandfather used to say that before his brain melted into mush, and I think that’s about where I am right now. Bearing-less. Pre-mush brain. (Excerpted from Calligraphy, Issue 728)