Saturday Mornings

Something was burning when I walked into the kitchen.

Not loudly. Not in a way that set off alarms or made the smoke detector scream. Just a thin ribbon of smoke lifting from the toaster oven, lazy and pale, carrying the sharp, sweet smell of sugar gone wrong. The kind of smell that sticks in your throat before you even realize you’ve breathed it in.

I stopped just inside the doorway. My keys were still in my hand, biting into my palm. For a second, I stood there trying to remember if I’d put anything in the oven that morning. Toast. A pastry. Anything.

I hadn’t. I was sure I hadn’t.

The oven timer clicked off on its own. A soft mechanical sound, like a decision being made without me. After that, there was only the refrigerator’s low hum and the sound of my breathing, a little too fast for no good reason.

I set my keys down slowly, as if sudden movement might make things worse. The smoke kept rising, steady and patient, as though it had all the time in the world. I crossed the kitchen and pulled the toaster oven door open.

Inside was a single piece of bread, blackened at the edges, curled in on itself like it had tried to escape the heat. Jam had bubbled over and hardened into glassy red spots on the tray. The middle was dark but not completely burned, the way toast gets when someone means to come back for it and doesn’t.

It looked old. Not stale-old. Forgotten-old. The kind of thing you leave behind when you leave in a hurry, or when you think you’ll be right back.

I stood there longer than I needed to. Long enough for the heat to brush my knuckles. Long enough to notice the uneven spread of jam, thicker on one side, exactly how my sister used to do it. She never aimed for neat. She aimed for enough.

I lived alone. I had for three years. No roommates. No overnight guests. No one with a spare key, as far as I knew.

I shut the oven door and opened the window over the sink. Cold air rushed in, sharp and clean, pushing the smoke back and thinning it until it vanished. The smell stayed anyway, clinging to the walls, my clothes, the back of my nose.

For a moment, I listened. Really listened. The building settling. Pipes clicking somewhere in the walls. A car passing outside. All the normal sounds that were supposed to reassure me. None of them did.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I jumped, then felt stupid for it. A missed call from my mother, ten minutes ago. No voicemail.

I didn’t call her back right away. Instead, I sat at the kitchen table. The chair legs scraped the floor, loud enough to make me wince. Everything felt too loud suddenly. Too present. Like the apartment was aware of me in a way it hadn’t been before.

I kept thinking about the toast. About how familiar the setup felt. Saturday mornings used to look like that. Toast with jam. Coffee poured and forgotten on the counter. Someone always burning something because they were talking too much, or laughing, or arguing about nothing that mattered.

My sister had burned toast every weekend she stayed over. She liked it sweet and soft, so she never watched it closely. She’d say it was fine, scrape off the worst parts, drown it in more jam. She used to say the smell meant you were home. That if you could smell burnt sugar and bread, it meant someone cared enough to be careless.

She used to walk into rooms without announcing herself. Open drawers like they belonged to her. Kick her shoes off wherever she happened to be standing. She had a way of filling space, of leaving little signs behind. A glass half full of water. A sweater on the back of a chair. Proof that she’d been there, even after she wasn’t.

I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Not like this.

I got up and pulled the tray out of the toaster oven. It was still warm. The bread crumbled when I touched it, breaking into dry flakes that scattered across the counter like ash. I swept them into my palm and dropped them into the trash. The jam stuck to the metal, resisting, as if it didn’t want to let go.

The smell lingered anyway.

I checked the rest of the apartment after that. Not because I expected to find anything, but because standing still felt worse. The bathroom was the same as I’d left it that morning. The bed still made, the pillow untouched. No open windows. No lights on. Nothing out of place.

In the hallway, I paused by the coat closet. The door was closed, but not all the way. Just shy of the frame, like someone hadn’t bothered to push it shut. I stared at it for a few seconds before reaching out and closing it myself.

My phone felt heavier when I picked it up again.

I finally called my mother back.

She answered on the first ring. “I was just checking in,” she said, too quickly, like she’d been waiting with the phone in her hand.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

There was a pause. Not a dropped call pause. A careful one. Just long enough to mean something.

“I was cleaning out a box,” she said. “One of the ones from the hall closet. Found your sister’s old spare key. The one she never returned.”

My throat tightened in a way I hadn’t felt in a while. “Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“I thought maybe…” She stopped. I could hear her breathing on the other end, the faint sound of the television in the background. Some game show she always watched without really watching. “Never mind.”

We sat with it. The quiet stretched. Across the room, the toaster oven made a soft ticking sound as it cooled, metal contracting, settling.

“I had something burning when I got home,” I said. The words felt strange once they were out. “Toast. I don’t know how.”

Another pause. This one heavier. Loaded.

“Well,” my mother said softly, “she always did like to make herself at home.”

We didn’t talk much after that. Just a few careful goodbyes. A promise to call again soon that neither of us explained.

After we hung up, I washed the tray until my fingers went numb. I wiped down the counter, the table, the handles on the cabinets. I took the trash out, even though it wasn’t full. The night air outside was colder than I expected. It cleared my head for a moment.

When I came back in, the kitchen smelled like soap and cold air and nothing else. Clean. Empty.

I stood there for a while anyway, listening to the quiet, waiting for it to feel normal again.

Before I went to bed, I unplugged the toaster oven. I wrapped the cord neatly, the way my sister never did. I checked the lock on the door twice. Then once more, just to be sure.

The apartment stayed silent.

Still, I left the kitchen light on overnight.

Just in case.