The wind was a ghost in fading green leaves that made the trees wave their branches as though scared of the ground. It was cold. The day was waning, leaving all the buildings to take on a grey monotony in the shadowy, half-light left. The sky was hiding from everything behind smoky clouds.

I walked up the stairs, quietly, to the top floor. Paused there, took out my keys. I entered the apartment to noise, life, and colour that I had lost somewhere on the journey home. "Hi, I'm home", my sister made some remark on the book she was reading. I took of my shoes and hugged my mother. Home was a ward against the darkness, it was without the cold - even the storm outside had lost its edge, it sounded benevolent now.

---*---

I struggled to wash the bowl I held among the other plates and cups, piled high in the sink. "Let me do it", my Mum called as she came in, depositing yet another bowl on the kitchen top. "No, it's ok". It displeased her, at first, but she relented, and I finished the task on my own as the last of the day darkened to blackness.

Later, when I was in my room, packing my bag for the next school day, my Mum came in and hugged me. “My arm was so sore, thank you for doing the dishes”. I embraced her back. Then, the lights went out and the day was said to be over.

---*---

Perhaps goodness in me compelled me to do the dishes for my mother that evening. Maybe it was kindness. But, as Solzhenitsyn said, “the line dividing good and evil runs through the heart of every man” – that same morning I had fought with her. And my retreat to a lonely, kitchen, bathed in mouldy, golden light with its dirty dishes, was from a ferocious fight with my sister.

Maybe, in the frigid midnight, when I let myself cry, to the heavens school scorned me for believing in, and which I was forgetting my pride – maybe that was kindness too.