Carolyn Oliver

Kitchen Girl

The window was too small for a man to fit through and the door locked, so Jana decided to sleep in the scullery. She swept crackling leaves from the courtyard through the kitchen—left clean for a morning that hadn’t come—and into a pile across from the scullery washbasins. Her first safe bed in months. 

When she woke she was stiff from lying still; even asleep, her body knew the value of silence. Streaky late-afternoon light revealed grease-filmed walls and hardened dirt between the floor tiles. Whoever had lived here before the war hadn't kept a close eye on the help. Jana had been a kitchen girl years ago, before she’d gone to live in her own small house, painted blue like the sea. 

Now she slipped her knives into her pockets and searched the scullery. In a deep cupboard with well-oiled hinges, stashed behind the big platters only used on feast days, she found the last kitchen girl’s treasure: something that once might have been a roll, a jar of blue-black olives in oil, two smaller jars of strawberry jam, a bottle of plum brandy. Everything else was lost to time or mice or hunger. 

Before she ate she tugged her coat over her thin back. It was a beautiful coat: soft, warm wool, green like bay leaves, though it was missing two buttons and most of the left arm. A week ago she’d pulled it off a mangled dead woman who’d only managed a few steps into the forest. Jana wandered for days afterward, eating mushrooms and chewing grass stems, hoping for a quiet death among fading ferns. Instead, she found screaming birds and endless stands of enormous gray trees. And then, in an unnatural clearing, a house. Most of a house. 

For an hour she sipped brandy and ate small spoonfuls of jam. The olives she would save for tomorrow, a reward after she’d gathered more food from the forest. Tonight it was probably safe enough to wash.

As she knelt by a pail, shaving curls of gray soap into the cold water with the dullest of her knives, she let her mind drift over the woman in the road, and the kitchen girl, who was probably moldering under the rubble on the other side of the courtyard. For them the war was over, the snow would never fall again to silver the trees. Would they trade places with her tonight? 

She bubbled the water until her reflection disappeared. When she sliced it off, her matted hair fell to the ground like softly rotted leaves. She swept it away and heaved the pail back to the scullery, refilled it. Home now, she decided, and set to work. In the rumbling night, the bombardment turned the clouds overhead dull gold. She scrubbed the floors until she found her face again. 


Carolyn Oliver’s very short prose and prose poetry has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Indiana Review, Monkeybicycle, Jellyfish Review, jmww, Unbroken, Tin House Online, CHEAP POP, Midway Journal, and New Flash Fiction Review, among other journals. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net in both fiction and poetry. Carolyn lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she serves as a poetry editor for The Worcester Review. Online: carolynoliver.net.