Half Kitchen Appliance

Time is a pale salamander swishing past my empty window; as my children look at me, cornerwise, in my accelerated process of aging, I sit as half-ghost in waiting, half-kitchen appliance in manner and deed. Whatever they expected eludes me; the gold-leaf incandescence of immortality, perhaps; not to visibly fail before their now saddening, disappointed eyes. There is little I can bequeath verbally, or impart with clandestine look, or allude to with symbolic gesture, except to write in spirit that all goodbyes, even silent and motionless ones, have to start somewhere…