Curtis, part three

Although she saw a well on a far corner of what appeared to be a kind of back yard, the kitchen sink did have its own pump. Once she cleared away far too many food encrusted, moldy dishes, Leta ran some water into the sink. It started brown and grew clearer as it rose from deep in the earth. She wet her hands and wiped her face, but mostly she was terribly thirsty. She cupped her hands and drank. The water tasted sweet with only a hint of iron and sulfur.

When she finished, she wiped away the drops and then looked into the cupboard. Her objective was coffee. A slight headache had begun, and she wanted to prevent it from increasing in intensity. She looked into the cabinets: two of five had doors missing, one had a door hanging by one small hinge, another was broken in half lengthwise, and two actually seemed to have fully functioning doors. The open cabinets were stacked with dirty dishes and glasses, and several serving bowls with used silverware was strewn everywhere. There was a couple of what appeared to be clean glasses, two bowls and one saucer in one of the closed cupboards. The other held a several cans of beans, two jars of home preserves, a tin of sugar, a half-full bottle of milk that she could smell from an arm’s length away and a brown bag of coffee. She found the coffee pot amidst several used pots and pans on the wood stove.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said aloud.

She transferred the pots, pans, utensils and dishes that had been left on the stove to the large tabletop. The table was large, looked hand-made and took up a large portion of the floor space in the kitchen. She loaded wood and kindling into the stove, and lit it with the match. The matches were easy to find amidst the haphazardly stacked wood, although the box had been slightly crushed. Once she was convinced that the fire would grow, she went back to the kitchen, ran the pump, rinsed the pot, which, surprisingly seemed clean, filled it with water and coffee, and put it on the now heating stove.

The kitchen was roughly the size of the living room, perhaps a little larger. The small assortment of broken cabinets was on the far wall with the stove alone on the wall to the left, the same side of the house as the living room fireplace. The door to the back was on that side of the house, as well. Rather than a modern refrigerator, the kitchen had an old icebox that was leaning against the opposite wall. At some point, the walls had been whitewashed, but where the paint hadn’t faded, it peeled, leaving large strips of wall exposed. The floor was cracked and stained wood subflooring that had several sticky spots and was littered with crumbs and other debris. An assortment of dirty dishes, pots and pans were scattered haphazardly everywhere.

“Yuck,” she said softly.

Still, she wanted her coffee, so she retrieved one of the larger pots from the large table with long benches on each side that was the centerpiece of the room, filled the pot with water, scrubbed it as well as she could with her hand, refilled it, and then put the full pot on the stove. While the coffee perked and the water in the pot heated, she cleaned a smaller pot the same way. Then she found two coffee cups and a couple of spoons among the dishes and soaked them in the water.

With all of the preparations underway, she sat on a bench at the table with her head in her hands. The encroaching headache had arrived in full, so she massaged her temples lightly while she waited for her coffee.

To be continued.