Something, I don’t know what, probably the A/C cutting on, or the cat, or the other cat, or maybe nothing, snaps me back into reality. My fresh ears are pelted by the hiss of the running faucet. Its harshness and loudness seem to be running directly through my skull.

The water is running through my cupped hands. Before it whisps through them, it must navigate a mound of fruit. Black Cherries. Plump. Round. Still fresh, but in the way that refrigeration keeps things fresh. They are starting to wrinkle, but still have a good texture.

I give the fruit a perfunctory shake and bound them in an arc to the cutting board. As always, a trail of water traces the path from sink to board. The fruits’ wash water drips and mingles sinking into wood grain. Assessing the fruit, it comes to me that it is night. The mix of lamps and candles and TVs and screens is shone to me through the glisten of the water. These glints dancing in the black rouge of the cherries is the closest my metropolitan eyes get to star gazing.

I sort the cherries to one side of the board. The knife is next to the cutting board—artifact like in presence. Like everything else in the room, it feels to have been here for so long. One by one, I grab cherries to halve. I place my knife on it and roll it cutting around the pit. Hidden in the lowlight, the cherry juice, starts to darken the cutting board. Slowly, it accumulates and concentrates. Small bits of dark juice bleed from each cherry and blend into the mass.

I wrest each pair of halves apart. More cherry juice is flung out into the more virgin areas of the cutting board. There’s far too little liquid to make any sound of a splash, but still the visual is more than enough. The drops smash into the board and splatter like ink into a lake. The wine colored liquid spiders across the still wet board until you lose it in the wood grain. Drop by drop the board is lost under the juice. Each droplet blending together to make a solid wall of pigment. Fit for the bowl, the pitted halves make it to their penultimate stop. The halves housing the stones remain on the board.

Each pit is popped out with the nail of a thumb, one at a time. Each pit makes a tearing, fleshy sounds. The cherry juice runs down my hands. It gets in my finger nails. It is just a little unsettling. Each pop. It is disgusting. Each cherry blood drip. The cherries feel less other, more familiar. The soft cherry skin like that of my own cheek. The tender inner flesh my mouth. That hard bony pit. The force before the fruit tears and rips. The wet sound of air fighting to fill the whole of the evicted stone. Each pit feels like a tooth pulled. The mounding pile of hard pits. I feel like a tooth fairy that’s behind on their quota. I need these teeth, each pulled from a child’s mouth, from my mouth. No child is ever harmed—they are at worst discomforted. But a little of that discomfort is shared. And what is shared sums. It sums to a mounting agony. Mountains of stone pit teeth. Trophies of work I’d rather leave back at the office. The cherry blood now stains me to the elbow. The blood pools at my feet. Still, miles of children are to be lessened the burden of their wiggly tooth.

An ad blares on the TV. I come back to again. Or maybe I leave where I was. I’ve now a bowl of cherry halves. I bin what is a cup or two of pits. I feel like I’ve been gone for an eternity. All in all, it was one of the shorter eternities I’ve endured.

I set the bowl aside and wash the cutting board. It is stained. I take my bowl to the couch and wonder where the stains from my last eternity went.