Part 9 of 9 · 2 minWhoever Is Getting Mine

I have taken it every day since. Fourteen months.

I put the box in the pantry fridge at nine-ten and I take it out at twelve-forty and I eat what is in it, which is what I put in it, which is mine. Nothing has been swapped. Nobody has touched it. There is no camera in that pantry, there was a proposal in 2019 and it was denied on cost, and I have not asked again.

I cook every night. I have got very good. I have got good in a way that people notice — a woman on my floor asked, last month, whether I would teach her, and I said no so fast that she stopped speaking to me.

The headaches never came back. I have never once been ill since the day the box stopped returning. I am, by every measure a doctor can take, a well man.

I cut things small because she liked them small.

On Monday I opened the box at twelve-forty and it was not mine.

Same three tiers. Same dented lid. Green rubber ring. Inside: curd rice, and a green chilli split down the middle, because a whole chilli makes it bitter and a chopped one makes it violent.

I have not told anyone. I did not ask the office boy. I did not go to Facilities.

I ate it standing at the counter.

It was the best thing I had eaten in fourteen months, and I went home that night and I stood at the counter until one in the morning making something worth sending back, and I have not stopped since, and I do not intend to.

Somebody is cooking for me.

I am not going to ask who. I am not going to turn the lid over. I have turned a lid over once in my life and it cost a woman eleven months and me everything that was left, and there is a kind of man who learns from that, and I am not him.

I am the other kind.

The kind who is happy.