Is it the taste of the water? Because of the water, the oyster tastes this way. Tiny esophagus. Fifty gallon filter. How different can the Atlantic taste, New Hampshire up to Maine? New Brunswick to Sade. She thinks to herself, her own name in the thought, Camille. Camille awoke with a thirst. A thirst for salt? A fly in the room. The nectarines are beginning to turn. Her mother would halve the good side. Make a salad, only disposing of the rot. Like the shells, accumulating over the shaved ice on a tin plate in her mind. Half a clock of halved oysters left, the other half shell-out, the empty white porcelain bowls facing down. She can feel the soft flesh on her tongue, but alas, the coffee’s almost gone.

Camille looks up, from her coffee cup. East, the direction of the sea. Where strong morning light hits the armrest over her spot on the sofa. Like a cat, soaking up the rays, her left arm always tans first. Signs of summer. The windows all open. Loratadine in the morning. Pollen thick and tennis ball green, dusted across the car hoods. City blocks warm to the touch, rising temperatures. Soon only shadows will offer respite.

Camille no longer notices traffic outside the window, no longer hears siren horns or motorcycles. It’ll be better this way, all life should acclimate first to this sound, the sound like a cousin to silence, a cacophony of noises that make a solid. A solid sound. But sound is not mass. It doesn’t matter. She thinks of it this way, a conglomerate, because she hates cacophony, an ugly word, that’s apt for description, but lacking in pleasure of tone. Perhaps this is the point. That this word is meant to represent a thing that is not blended but chaotic. Cacophony to Camille, is a kitchen sink. Things collect, but are never one there, don’t want to be there at all, really. Nobody wants them there in that medium place between buried under food, and safely stacked away.

She loves these plates, each adorned with their single thick stroke of paint, smeared across the center. After the wedding, if a plate’s base paint didn’t compliment the pallete of the dish, she’d search for the right color to accompany a crescent slice of avocado, laying over a split soft boiled egg, and a single strip of smoked salmon. She’d swap the plate she pulled for one with a turquoise brush stroke to meet its coral fish, its yellow sun, and soft green moon.

The baby kicks. Camille straightens her spine, sits upright. Nineteen weeks. Nineteen weeks until it squeaks. Before she is halved and split in two. Camille in the kitchen with her coffee cup, in an otherwise empty apartment, the sun fading the fabric of that one arm of their sofa, the light in the room, the book raised in a V, a sentence waiting to be picked up on, a paragraph needing to be reread. She’ll never be alone like this. Camille will never be alone like this again.