The thing beeps when it's done, three times, and my daughter doesn't get up. She's waiting for the fourth beep it never makes, the way you wait for someone to finish a sentence they've forgotten they started.
Inside, the plate turns. Slow, patient, a full rotation every few seconds, dragging a bowl of leftover soup past the little bulb over and over. I used to walk away and let it work. Now I watch it. I can't help it.
That soup is being heated by radiation, agitating the water inside it until the molecules can't hold still. There is water in almost everything we eat because there is water on this one specific rock and, as far as anyone has actually confirmed, nowhere else we can reach. The steam that fogs the door came up out of an ocean at some point. It will go back.
Up there the whole atmosphere, all of it, every breath every person has ever taken, is thinner than the shell of an egg. You can see the edge of it, a blue line, and above the line there is nothing warm at all, nothing that turns, nothing that beeps.
Down here my daughter is reheating soup because she got cold and she is home and it is Tuesday.
The plate stops. She takes the bowl out without a mitt, hisses, sets it down too fast. Blows on the spoon. I did not learn much in orbit that I can use at a dinner table. Only this: a warm bowl of anything, held in two hands, in a lit kitchen, is the least likely thing I have ever seen, and I have looked at the whole planet at once.