Between the Salad Forks by Kailum Graves

After the divorce, the first one appeared between the salad forks.

I had opened the cutlery drawer looking for something ordinary to do with my hands. It was late. The kitchen light was the wrong kind of bright. On the draining board sat one plate, one glass, one knife with peanut butter drying on it. I had been living alone for three months and still moved through the flat like a man subletting his own life.

The thing in the drawer was no bigger than my thumb joint. Pale as dough. It had folded itself into the bowl of a spoon and was watching me with the tired expression of a clerk at the end of an empire.

I said, “Sorry,” before remembering the drawer was mine.

It blinked once, slowly, and put both hands around a breadcrumb.

That was all.

I shut the drawer. Opened it again. It was still there, now chewing with tremendous concentration.

I did not mention it to anyone, which made sense. There are things you can say after a divorce and still remain a plausible adult. She left in March. I’m sleeping badly. But if you add There seem to be tiny domestic gods living in the cutlery, people begin speaking to you in a tone usually reserved for frightened horses.

By the end of the week there were seven.

They kept mostly to the drawer, though one particularly severe individual took to sitting behind the sugar jar as if overseeing an inquiry. They were not pretty. They looked made rather than born—pinched out of dust, old salt, and whatever gathers in kitchens where two people have stopped reaching for the same things.

I never named them. Naming would have implied confidence. Instead, I knew them by habit.

One slept in the teaspoons and hoarded small unfinished objects—a button, a bread-tag, the paper end from a tea bag. One came out only when I stood too long at the sink. One would freeze whenever my phone lit up and then relax, visibly, when it was only a bank alert or my brother asking whether I wanted the bookshelf.

The largest one liked the slot where the dinner knives went but never touched the knives. It sat beside them with an air of private expertise.

I began leaving them things. Not much. A flake of pastry. A grain of rice. The corner of a biscuit softened in tea. I told myself I was conducting an experiment. In fact, I was relieved something in the flat still required feeding.

They accepted offerings without gratitude. This seemed healthy.

At night I would hear them moving faintly in the drawer—a dry, ceremonial rustling. Once, unable to sleep, I went into the kitchen and found three of them hauling a pea in solemn procession past the forks. I stood there in my socks and watched until one looked up at me in such clear irritation that I apologised again and went back to bed.

The days developed a shape.

Work. Train. Milk. Bread. Home. Open drawer.

There are heartaches that announce themselves properly, with sobbing and slammed doors and the purchase of very poor wine. And then there are the smaller ones. Taking out one mug. Washing one plate. Hearing something funny on the radio and turning, for half a second, to tell the person who is no longer there.

They grew plump in the evenings when I stood at the counter eating over the sink. They multiplied after I found one of her hair ties under the radiator and sat on the floor with it in my hand for twenty minutes, as if it might begin to explain itself. One night, after typing out a message to her and deleting it three times, I opened the drawer and found them lively as festival-goers.

Once I understood that, I should probably have been alarmed. Instead, I felt an odd kind of relief. The flat was not merely empty. It held its own witness.

One of them shared her habit of tapping twice before settling. That one undid me.

I found it one Sunday morning perched in the bowl of a teaspoon, tapping-tap, tapping-tap, looking out at me as if I were the slow one in the exchange. I sat down at the kitchen table so quickly the chair squealed.

“Don’t,” I said, to the room in general.

The little creature paused, hands on its knees.

I laughed then, because the alternatives were less manageable. Afterwards I cried in the very dignified manner available to divorced men in rented flats, which is to say bent forward, soundless, with one hand over the mouth as though stifling a cough.

The thing in the spoon watched the whole time. When I was done, it climbed down and vanished among the forks.

Summer arrived without my consent. The light changed. I stopped checking my phone every six minutes. I answered my brother. I gave him the bookshelf. I threw out the soup at the back of the fridge. I slept, occasionally, all the way through.

And gradually there were fewer of them.

The one behind the sugar jar disappeared first. Then the solemn pea-bearers. Then the tapping one. For a while I thought they were hiding from me out of spite, but the drawer had begun to look unmistakably like a drawer again. Metal. Crumbs. The old receipt for batteries. Nothing numinous.

I stood in the kitchen one evening with the drawer open and felt, with surprising sharpness, not relief but panic.

If they left, what would remain?

Not the marriage, certainly. Not her. Not even the version of the flat in which two mugs by the sink meant morning instead of oversight.

I began checking for them first thing each morning.

In late August there was only one left.

It sat in the bowl of a teaspoon, thin as a matchstick, its knees drawn up, watching me with the patient contempt of the very old. I broke the end from my toast and laid it beside it on the counter.

It didn’t move.

“I found the warranty for the kettle,” I said.

The kitchen, to its credit, did not answer.

I stood there a moment longer, one hand on the counter.

“You were right about the small spoons,” I said.

The little thing lowered its head. Or perhaps the light changed. Then I went to work.

In the evening the drawer was empty.

Not empty, exactly. The forks were there. The teaspoons. The loose sugar in the corners. But empty of witness.

I stood very still.

Then I took out one mug, filled the kettle, and waited for it to boil.

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KAILUM GRAVES — Kailum is a writer and multidisciplinary creative working across fiction, poetry, and visual arts. His work is often drawn to the uncanny, the intimate, and the emotionally unresolved, with a particular interest in how strange premises can illuminate ordinary human grief, love, and survival. His writing has been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Jennifer Burbidge Short Story Award, and the Book Links Short Story Competition. He is based in Australia.

Art by LINDA HAWKINS — Linda is primarily a watercolor artist, who also enjoys photography. She and her husband love to travel and explore the great outdoors. Linda captures their adventures on camera, and as a result has plenty of resource material from which to paint. Her visual art has appeared in various literary magazines, including Flash Frog, The Jupiter Review, Pithead Chapel, Moss Puppy Mag, and Wrongdoing Magazine. You can find her on BlueSky – @lindamayhawkins.bsky.social; Instagram – @lindamayhawkins; or at lindamayhawkins.com.