The Guest Who Kept Doing the Dishes

It is 9:40 on a Saturday night and Nell is the only person standing.

The party is eleven people and it is going well, which she knows because she has been checking. The good bottle got opened. Someone’s laughing in the other room in that particular way that means the evening has found its legs. There is a plate of the little apricot things left, and she made those, and they went, and she noticed them going the way you notice weather.

She is not the host. That’s the part worth saying twice. This is Priya’s flat, Priya’s birthday, Priya’s dishwasher — and Nell arrived at seven with two bags, one of which was ice nobody had asked her to bring, and she has not sat down since.

She could tell you exactly why, at every point in the evening. The door needed answering. The oven timer. The thing with the coats. Somebody had to find a vase for the flowers that came in that paper wrapping, and it turned out somebody was her, on a chair, in the high cupboard, in tights.

Each reason was true. That’s what makes this hard to see from the inside: every single reason was true.

Now it is 9:40 and the kitchen has gone quiet in the way kitchens do when the party moves to the other room. On the counter, in a stack, are the glasses. Not the wine glasses — those are fine, those are in use. The other ones. The ones from the toast, with the sticky rings, which will be genuinely annoying tomorrow if nobody deals with them tonight.

Nell is looking at them.

Through the doorway she can see the sofa, and there is a space on it, and the space has been there for about twenty minutes.

Somewhere behind her ribs there is a small, tight, familiar feeling, and if she stopped and looked directly at it — which she won’t, not tonight — it would say something like: if I sit down, what am I here for?