Caels kitchen is one of the kitchens in a house which, unofficially but inevitably referred to as house with people in it, has become synonymous with the annual festival gathering of the same name. Rambling, raptraddling, slanty, dilapidated, none too clean, the boards are retiring, the neighborhood's obscure to impossible to find, it's bigger on the inside than on the outside. You go there. By about the end of the second day, the thing happens to you. Your pants cuffs are wet from the water on one of the bathroom floors, there's not enough bathrooms, you've walked in on people of all sexes, younger in the flesh than you'd been the night before, sometimes a series of shower curtains is a wall, sometimes it takes forever to find your way back to your little group but it's ok, it doesn't make you nervous, you smile while taking a piss, and it occurs to you—how long's it been since you felt this loose with being lost—and along about in here somewhere is when you stumble into caels kitchen. She is cooking for you. No, not just you, silly, but somehow at the same time just for you. She's nut brown, lanky, constantly interrupted, a little vulnerable, she smiles easily but there's a fierceness to it, an antifragility that commands respect even as you realize that she's the one you opened the door on a while ago, the one in one of the "men's" rooms because there's never enough bathrooms and you were kind of lost, and you don't know how someone can still seem so dignified when you just saw them squatting with white cotton panties around their ankles, a toothbrush sticking out of their mouth, but she does, only it's not like this big thing, you know? You wonder how you could possibly explain any of this to anyone, and now you smile sympathetically at the old you from two days ago, who'd gotten a little irked at hearing the seventeenth person say, there's something that happens to you, along about the end of the second day, i don't know, i can't explain it, something just shifts, and then you know— You know *what?* (you had asked.) You know you're at the house. The house? The house with people in it! And then you know. (2016)