The Kitchen God

I am building a god in my kitchen, piece by piece.

His legs are old rusty kitchen tongs, the sort used for lifting ice blocks in the days before electric refrigerators. He is bowlegged, and his feet are sharp and full of tetanus. When he walks across the counters, he leaves scratches in the formica.

His body is a thick red candle, fat and squat and smelling of cinnamon and pepper. The top of the tongs are pressed up inside the center of the candle, and a short thread of wick hangs from below and between his legs, which he unashamedly leaves visible to the world.

The Kitchen God is thoroughly immodest.

One arm is a potato peeler, pointing straight out from his body like a signpost without a sign. The other is an oyster fork, one tine for my father, one for my son and one for the holy spirit. Although my father is dead, I never had a child and there are no spirits in my house, no matter what the creaking floorboards in the upstairs spare room might be trying to indicate.

His head is a tea ball, armored and silver and vented around the cheeks and mouth. The chain trails down the back of his head like a topknot, and jingles softly when I putter around the coffee maker in the morning. He speaks to me in chimes and soft rattle and does more for me than any other god anyone else has made, which is to say that he expects nothing from me.

I am reliable at delivering nothing.

Nothing is my specialty.