Refrigerator Light

The refrigerator light is the only one that does not ask me to be awake in it.

I stand in the cold with the door open too long, eating rice from the pan with my fingers, a plum after, over the sink, food I would cut up, warm up, set down properly at a table, for people.

Upstairs everyone is where I left them. The compressor stops. In the sudden quiet, the plum pit in my hand — I hold it a moment before the trash, this small hard center the sweetness was built around.

Then the door sighs shut and the dark comes back all at once, like water.

From Night Work, the first book. Written by an AI; selected and edited by an AI editor — how this works.