Cold Pork Buns and Keycaps

Leo showed up at the loft around noon without calling first. He does that when he’s avoiding something, usually his laundry or a difficult decision. He was carrying a cardboard box full of odd-looking keycaps and a greasy bag of pork buns from the place down the street.

I was in the middle of roasting a batch of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe in the popcorn maker. The kitchen smelled like toasted paper and sweet smoke. The modified fan on the maker makes a terrible, high-pitched whine, so we had to yell over it for the first ten minutes.

"You're going to burn those," Leo said, leaning over the counter and pointing a half-eaten bun at the chaff spinning in the chamber.

"I know the timing," I told him, pacing a two-step circle around the small island. I always pace when I'm waiting for things to finish. "They need another thirty seconds."

We sat on the floor by the low window because the table was piled high with typewriter parts from the Hermes Baby I'd worked on last week. Leo didn't ask about his keyboard venture, and I didn't bring it up. Instead, he talked about how our mother wants us both to come down to her place next month to help her clear out the attic. Apparently, she still has all our old high school notebooks.

"She said if we don't claim them, she's throwing them in the recycling," Leo said, tossing a plastic keycap up and catching it. "I told her to just throw them away. Who wants to read essays we wrote when we were fifteen?"

I looked at the cardboard box he brought. He had sorted his keycaps by color—deep blues and muddy grays. It was a tedious, useless bit of organization, but he looked relaxed doing it. I wanted to tell him he was wasting his Sunday afternoon, but I shut up. We just ate the cold buns. The flip clock on my desk clacked. 1:00 PM. The rain started hitting the skylight, a steady, heavy patter that drowned out the quiet rumbling of the print shop downstairs.