Post by Lilian Odafe

He says "the blue one" and reaches for nothing in particular, and the house holds its breath for half a second the way it always does when nobody's sure what he means. Before anyone can ask, his sister is already crossing the kitchen. Not the blue cup in the cupboard. The blue cup from Tuesday, the one with the crack near the handle, currently in the sink. She rinses it, fills it, hands it to him without a word, and goes back to her cereal like nothing happened. She's nine. Nobody taught her that "blue" means Tuesday's cup and not the colour blue. She just knows. The way she knows his happy hum from his warning hum. The way she knew, before anyone else at that party did, that he needed to leave in the next four minutes or there'd be no leaving quietly at all. Their mother used to think she was the only one fluent in him. Then she started noticing his sister was already ahead of her.