That time

She got up from the chair like she’d done a hundred times. “Lunch?” From the precocious glimmer in his eyes, she knows he has had enough. Not like the first time, when a short stack of raspberry grenadine pancakes was all that was needed, the icing on the cake of a long-winded, full-waxen moonlight appraisal. And yet, he stood there. Time sublimated his mood, sometimes; further, there was no reason that that statuary stance could not be interpreted as something vestigial. “Lamb or chicken?” he asks, tendentiously. “Neither,” she says, offhandedly. That was that time; and she still remembers every detail, right down to the spider-line paint crack in the carmine wall. The first time, there was only the smell of maple sugar.