Allesmarkt

He'd had the tomatoes all along.

That was the thing. They'd been in the cabinet the whole time, two cans of them, right where he'd put them three weeks ago. He hadn't needed to remember. He'd never been out.

He opened both cans anyway and stood at the stove watching the oil heat, thinking about nothing in particular the way you do when you've been alone long enough that the silence stops feeling like anything.

The cumin went in first. Then the garlic. The smell of it filled the kitchen the way good smells do in small spaces, and he added the tomatoes and turned the heat down and watched the sauce begin to move.

It was the color that did it.

That particular red, the deep going-darker red of tomatoes breaking down in a pan, and then without any warning or transition he was back in the Allesmarkt with a lipstick tube in his hand and a woman looking at him with that careful expression, her hand already out.

Rebel Rose.

He stirred the sauce once and set the spoon down.

He hadn't thought about her since. That was what he told himself on the walk home that day, and the next morning, and somewhere around Wednesday when he'd found himself standing in the kitchen at eleven at night eating crackers over the sink for no reason he could identify. He hadn't thought about her.

He'd just thought about - adjacent things.

The correction, mostly. The way she'd started to say one thing and then said the true thing instead, right out loud, in front of him, without making a production of it.

Nice bumping into you.

A pause.

Meeting you.

He made the wells for the eggs with the back of a spoon and cracked them in one at a time, the way you had to, and put the lid on and stepped back. Nothing to do now but wait. The eggs would set in their own time and there was no stirring, no adjusting, nothing useful to do with his hands.

He stood there and watched the condensation collect on the inside of the lid.

She was from somewhere else. That much was obvious - something in the way she'd looked at the store, the slight recalibration people do when they're not on their own ground. He didn't know where. He hadn't asked. He hadn't asked anything, really. He'd just crouched on the floor of the Allesmarkt handing back her things like a person with no questions at all.

The eggs were almost set.

He thought about whether he needed anything from the store.