Fiction: Left of the kitchen.

I wouldn't have minded, if he'd caught his words on a spluttered inhale but that didn't happen. Instead, after those words fell out of his baratone throat, he smiled, removed his coffee from the counter and slithered out. I watched the elderly man in war dress flick through a book he'd retrieved from the community basket, a woman spoon fed her blancmange shaped baby. A small woodlouse crawled from the oak window sill, thought better of it and scurried back. The sunlight poured in staining the floor in rainbows.
She tilted her body out from the adjoining room, weighted on one foot, fingers wrapped around the doorframe,
"Do you want cheese on toast? I'm hankering." Her jovial Dutch accent lifted my mood with ease, her metal septum piercing caught the light, plum lips and black tunnels contrasted it.
"I'd love that."  
"Don't tell Steph'" she yelled, already deep within the kitchen, the smell of hard-worked grill hit my nostrils.
"Another expresso please Jeni," the gentleman from the corner shook a soft leather coin purse at me without getting up. His carved cane rested on the back of an empty chair. I set to it.