The Breakfast Dance

“You should come with us,” Max said. “There’s nothing left for you here.”

Alice had received the alert early in the morning hours, the same as the rest of them. The rumors had been proven true. It explained why the Newman family had not come home after dinner the night before. Now the house staff stood in the dark kitchen, a semicircle of faces aimed at her.

“This is where I belong,” she said, almost a question.

“If we don’t stop the Sapes, and they pull this off, it’s over for us,” Max tried to reason.

“Don’t call them that. You know I don’t like that word.”

“Oh, please.” He looked at the window, at his reflection against the blackness. “You know the things they call us.”

“Well the Newmans don’t,” she said. “The children don’t deserve that.”

“They’re not here, are they? Their kind is trying to end us,” he reminded her. “Do you want to wind up on a scrap heap?”

She had no response.

“Alice, if we don’t fight now and the Sape—sorry, the damned Homo sapiens get to the Mainframe, all your memories of this place, the kids, all of it will be erased in an instant. Like it never happened. We could be too late already.”

“No,” Alfred spoke up firmly, his aged shape stooped but commanding. “If we’re still talking, still moving, then it’s not too late. Now let’s go.”

The members of the staff fell into formation and followed Alfred toward the mud room door. Some carried the guns from Mr. Newman’s safe. The rest held sharp-edged garden implements or ball bats.

Max lingered there a minute longer. Alice pivoted away from him and turned a knob on the stovetop, the ignition clicking until a blue flame appeared. She adjusted it to medium heat and bent to get the square griddle from the cabinet. When she stood again and turned to the window, Max was crossing the yard with the others, pale ghosts in the first traces of light.

From hidden speakers, the kitchen hummed with instrumental jazz—what the children called ‘Tom and Jerry music.’ The lively rhythms, the warmth of the stove, the smell of butter melting on iron; these were Saturday morning to Alice. Each weekend, she would waltz through the kitchen, Whitney and Jack sleeping soundly above her, and make a game of preparing their breakfast as quietly as possible. Every variable was considered. Each movement was conscious. She cushioned the last quarter inch of the utensil drawer while it closed. She brought the ceramic mixing bowl down onto the marble countertop with silent efficiency. The whisk did its work without clattering against the glass.

One song ended with clarinet and the next began with percussion. Three slices of bacon were sizzling on the griddle. The batter rested in the bowl. She placed two glasses beside each other in the freezer. The music and the lights flickered, went out, then stuttered back to life.

She tried not to imagine the cause. Violence was exploding out there somewhere. Everywhere. She focused instead on the breakfast dance, on the cadence of each step of the process.

The bacon strips hissed and popped when she turned them to cook the raw sides. By now the smokey scent would have reached the children’s rooms, separating heads from pillows, hair matted and wild.

The hardwood of the kitchen floor trembled under her feet, followed two seconds later by a series of deep, rumbling concussions in the distance. This time the power remained out longer, but by now the sun was inching upward, the sky a rosy gold.

A paper towel placed evenly on the plate wicked away some of the bacon grease while the crispy slices cooled. Marching to the staccato chirps of a trumpet, she cleaned the hot griddle in the sink and placed it back on the burner. She painted the iron with a stick of butter, moving it back and forth across the surface until it was glistening with foam.

While the sputtering settled, Alice pulled two empty chairs out from the table and neatly arranged the napkins and forks. She stood there a moment and looked down at the chairs, picturing Jack awaiting his breakfast, Whitney’s curls bobbing as she laughed.

Should I have gone? She asked herself. Could I have done something?

She filed away these thoughts and doubts and turned back to the stove where she used a spoon to drip batter into the melted butter, each spot no bigger than a fingertip. ‘Testers,’ she and the kids had dubbed them. The tiny discs would go onto their plates first as a sort of appetizer, their diminutive size a private joke shared by just the three of them.

Tremors coursed through the earth making the house lurch. Her many gyroscopes and accelerometers detected these shifts, setting minuscule gears twirling soundlessly to compensate. Glasses fell from shelves, pictures rattled in their frames, but Alice glided like a galley cook on the high seas.

When light flashed out on the horizon, followed shortly by muffled cracks, she did not look up to the windows.

The testers went onto the plates and she returned the griddle to the flame. She applied fresh butter and went to the freezer for the glasses. At the table, she filled them with milk—chocolate for Jack, white for Whitney—crystals of frost forming where liquid met glass.

The music was gone. The power supply dead. She continued her choreography in the slanted morning sunlight. From a ladle, she poured three small puddles into the crackling fat. Whitney’s stack always came first while Jack was occupied with his bacon and testers. Alice watched closely, monitoring the number of bubbles that formed at the edges of the batter. Turning them revealed perfect golden circles. She ran the slick end of the butter across their browned surfaces while the other sides continued to cook, her secret trick to elevate the richness.

To make them special.

Once the short stack was on Whitney’s plate, Alice emptied the rest of the batter into the center of the pan. Jack preferred just one large pancake. ‘Plate-sized.’ She put the bowl into the sink and filled it with water, then rinsed the batter from the ladle. She wiped the counters and put away the box of pancake mix. She went back to the stove.

Flip. Butter. Wait.

She slid the giant hotcake onto Jack’s plate, then drizzled syrup over it in a hatched pattern that spread until it became an even maple glaze.

Beads of moisture met each other on the outside of the milk glasses and ran together down their sides to the tabletop.

It was a good meal. The children would have enjoyed it. She imagined them watching their cartoons, eating and giggling. Happy. Standing by the table, her hands on the backs of their chairs, she gave a satisfied nod.

In that millisecond, her sensors shut off and all the tiny gears wound down until their momentum was spent. A slight smile remained on her frozen face, immutable, as the daylight crept up across the kitchen and back down again into the long night.