Kitchen queen

Armed with knives, we meet on SIPA's fifteen. Our arms are bare to the elbows; the walls are windows. The faraway lit George Washington Bridge is slung like a string of beads across the river. We love but leave those beads slipping off that string into Jersey, for ours is the kitchen. We prop her steel door open with origami-ed cardboard. We slip the knives out of their linen cloths; unsheath armfuls of baguettes; cut them into slices, coins of unseen, unheard of thickness and gold; eat their heels. The piles resemble the very side of mountain on which five loaves fed five thousand. We dream of our own five thousand –

Cornered, bearded, Misha opens bottle after bottle of Portuguese and Italian wine; gently pushes the corks back inside the bottles' necks; hums. The bottles clink; the hour of the feast approaches. We wash the heads of cabbage and cratelets of strawberries, grapes, grape tomatoes. Our fingers take on the skin of raisins with each minute at the steel sink. With each peeled cabbage leaf, our fingers stain a violent violet. They are stubborn, those leaves. Only the surface ones come off as large thin cups which we put like petals on round plastic trays: large thin cups into which we pour grapes and grape tomatoes, shining beads –

Ana dislikes the violent violet; goes to lay white tablecloths on the longest table we have ever seen; over her shoulder gives the bridge a glance of envy on account of the beads. The roofs she sees are upturned faces. Meanwhile, mindful of the hour, Daniel takes enormous wheels of brie from the refrigerator. (Her door is bare; no Olya's ungraceful drawing or post-earthquake lettering on yellow manila paper hangs there by a slip of magnet.) He peels the price stickers off the brie, and takes a knife to it: Daniel who one day when the rain was coming down straight and tents were being pitched (to stable the horses for a duel, or so I told a girl and she believed me) mapped for me the way the Slavic words for "bread" and "want" chain, change, from Russian to Ukrainian to Polish to Czech to Slovak to Slovenian to Serb to Croat. Russian doesn't meet with Serbian; Russian is New York and Serbian is Jersey, and every language in between is a bead –

but the hour approaches. Mind's foray into memory is distracted by the weight of trays arrayed with violent violet cabbage leaves and fat strawberries, grapes, grape tomatoes, olives. We carry them out to our own five thousand. (They mill and hum.) Misha brings the bottles of wine by the necks, by the scruffs of their collars. In the kitchen we sweep the world's finest goldest sawdust off the tables onto our palms; wash the knives; eat pilfered brie standing up, the way we ate in my youth those nights when my father had disemboweled a copy machine on the table in hopes of finding out the trouble, the plaint, and had not finished by dark –

It is dark, and has been. Our five thousand eat as if they have not eaten all winter.