I am sitting on the rotating kitchen stool in front of the stove, pouring batter from the food processor into the black, dissheveled frying pan. It is almost noon, but making pancakes seems a natural, methodical movement. Seems to break up the lump at the edge of my throat. The bubbles in the batter swell and burst as I take the spatula, slide it underneath the circle of dough and flip it. We used to watch the patterns on the face of our pancakes, tell each other what we saw in that brown and white menagerie of shapes. We are too old for this now.

I take a pinch of cinnamon and sprinkle the fine grains onto each lump of thick, white batter that stares up at me from the stove-top. There is a nice smelling faint brown mist lingering on my thumb and index finger. And I think, death is exactly like a pinch of cinnamon between my fingers; it is in everything and the remnants of it are difficult to brush away.

We are playing Qur’an in the kitchen as we soap up the dishes and rinse them, lay them to one side. We are silently preparing dinner and my father is on the phone. His voice is wary, crackling on the line, his voice is exhausted and makes the pit of my stomach churn, makes me want to go to bed and lay there for hours, sleep through these days of misappropriated heartache. Makes me want to flip pancakes to forget.

She is asleep, only asleep. And the rest of us have so much time to make sure the pancakes do not burn, to eat them with honey or philly cheese and brush away the things that are caught in our eyes.

We are cooking, and quietly waiting for someone to tell us how to react to such news, how to feel when someone so close is gone.