Eli began with a meal.
Not the last one before the raid, not a ration in a gate, not the food he remembered tasting when he woke into his second chance. He wrote about a pot on an ordinary stove and the argument that always followed when someone scraped the bottom too hard.
He remembered the noise better than the recipe. Metal against a scorched base. A wooden spoon offered too late. Somebody insisting the burned part tasted good if you did not call it burned.
The first sentence looked ridiculous beside the pages where he had recorded dates of disasters.
He nearly crossed it out.
Instead he added the window over the sink. Its latch had never fitted neatly. In winter somebody wedged folded paper into the frame. He could remember the paper lifting when the wind came from the wrong side, a little flutter he had found annoying enough to notice and unimportant enough never to describe.
He wrote that down too.
The page filled slowly. He did not know which detail would become precious once it was gone. Trying to save all of them made him grip the pen too hard. He stopped, stretched his fingers and chose a single room rather than a whole childhood.
