Porridge

Bea pours cream into a white jug and sets down two bowls of sweet gluey oats. He likes the jug's handle best—a protruding ear, the kind a mother tapes back at night, a handle to curve exactly into his small palm. He pours a moat round the bowl's castle.

Bea talks as she eats.

Before rockets went to the moon, people thought the earth was flat. Columbus chained his crew's feet to the ship's deck, they thought they would fall off the end of the world. Others said a wall, one hundred and fifty feet high and made of ice, rose at the earth's edges. They said beyond the wall lay The Unknown. Now what, my darling, do you suppose that is?

His castle is melting into its moat. Oil slicks and lumpy oats hang in the yellowing cream. Federico licks the back of his spoon and brings it close to his left eye, which grows large, bulbous. Behind him, the kitchen falls out to the spoon's rim and will not stop turning.