“The squash is almost ready,” she says, when she hears me come in. “Go ahead and sit down.”

As I enter the dining room I notice that my plate is half-covered with cheese, a huge pyramid of cheese, built with large cubes nearly two inches square. I stare at the cheese. She brings in the squash and sees me looking at the cheese.

“They weren’t supposed to be that big,” she tells me.

“Why are they?” I ask.

She looks at me. “Fate intervened.”

With those words, I see three ancient women: one measuring out lengths of string, another marking those lengths on enormous blocks of cheese, the third carving the cheese into cubes with a long dark knife.

“Something wrong?”

“No,” I say, “I was just imagining the Cheese Fates.”

“I said Fate, not fates.” The edge in her voice startles me.

We sit down to eat.

“They still might melt,” she says.

I look puzzled.

“On the squash.”

I put a couple of the cubes on my squash. Islands now, in the soft, steamy yellow, the orange cubes seem out of place, unnatural.

The cheese is not melting.

I poke at the cheese with my fork, pressing it deeper into the squash.

“They sure are big,” I say.

“Fate intervened,” she says again, but this time not to me.

I glance at her, then look back at my plate. I begin to hope the cheese will never melt, and that if it doesn’t, perhaps the dark knife will never carve again.

++