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The kids will be home soon.

Susan reads the time on the oven's LED clock and registers this fact with the automatic efficiency always displayed towards events of modest importance which are repeated day after day. She reacts as she would to a car's alert that it's running out of gas (if she could drive): unconsciously and immediately.

From the fridge she takes a celery stalk, a red pepper, a carrot, and a roll of cookie dough. She turns the oven on. From the drawer she takes out her knife, the one with the large, long blade, carefully inserted in a plastic sheath with a push-and-slide button, for security. A chef's knife. She removes the sheaf and uses the knife to cut four slices of cookie dough, which she leaves on the baking tray. She puts the blade of the knife under the tap for a few seconds, scrubs it gently with a sponge, and dries it with the towel that always hangs from her apron.

Now she cuts the vegetables. The celery, first, slicing the blade down the middle, and then curving the blade down, cutting the stalk into manageable pieces. The carrot does not yield so easily, it requires of a chopping motion. The blade hits the board with force, a satisfying sound, after it has pierced through the dense, orange flesh. Then the pepper, which is more complicated. The tip of the blade is inserted at the top, by the tail, and sawed up and down and around it. A light pull and the green tail is removed. Then the blade is pressed down along one of the ridges along the side, the pepper is cut in half, the white flakes of seeds removed in the sink, flicked off with the tip of the knife. Now the halves are cut into thin slices. The kids want them thin, or they will not eat them.

The oven beeps, shrill. Susan almost drops her knife. She slides the baking tray into the oven, a puff of heat blows her hair back, like she use to wear it, before. Susan arranges the vegetables on a platter smartly, around a little bowl of dip. She cleans up the wooden board, the knife, again, the cookie dough goes back in the fridge. A quick look at the oven: the kids will be here in five minutes. The cookies will be ready in five minutes.

The kitchen was built two years ago to her taste, with Jason's money, as an extension to the house. The appliances are stainless steel, the counter is pale granite, the lamps are Italian, the pots and pans, French. There are two windows, one on each side. The one in back looks onto the backyard, and the woods beyond. The one in front looks onto the front lawn, which slopes down gently to the road, and the fields and farmhouses across it. Susan stares at all this, the views from the windows, which she knows so well she feels she could paint them by memory. There are photographs of those views in her mind, for each hour of the day in each season. She doesn't even need to look at them anymore. She surveys the kitchen. Everything is in order, as usual. Except for something reflecting the light sharply, by the sink. She forgot to put her knife away.

She walks over to the counter to put the knife back into the security of its sheath in the drawer and the oven beeps, again. The cookies are ready. Susan stands poised in the middle of the kitchen, knife in hand, the sweet scent of fresh-baked cookies wafting through the air. The sound of a motor, outside. Susan looks out of the window and sees the yellow flash of the school-bus. It stops in front of the driveway, and her two children come running out of it, their heavy schoolbags (Spiderman for him, Dora for her) bobbing up and down against their little backs, their little arms flying.

Susan, somehow, despite all her preparations, feels caught off guard. She has time, though. She has time to put the large knife away securely in its plastic sheath in the drawer and take the cookies out from the oven and while they cool poor two glasses of milk and greet her children with a smile and a warm, soft, welcoming, motherly hug. She does not move.

Why not leave the knife in the oven for a moment, heat it up, red-hot. Inadvertently. Forget it there, just the time it takes for the kids to come in and drop their bags and put their lunch boxes on the counter by the sink like she taught them to do (so she can then open them and clean all their little plastic containers, afterward). Then she would grab the mittens for the oven and take out the cookies, by now overcooked and dark brown, except she would bring out the knife instead and plunge it into their soft little bodies. The smell of searing flesh would mingle with that of burnt cookies. There would be a scream, perhaps, shrill like the oven's, muffled quickly with the towel always at her disposal. Then she would have to run way. She'd leave through the back door, knife still in hand. She wouldn't even take off her apron. She'd run across the backyard and into the woods, her hair trailing behind her wildly.

"Mom! Mom!"

Welcome home, my children. My darlings. You're home.