Dawn Breaks the Clearing

The light through the curtain was the particular white of new snow — not bright, not yet, but present in the way that snow-light always is, filling the room from no single direction, making everything in it equally visible and equally still. She had been awake for a while. She wasn't sure how long. The cabin made sounds in the cold that she was still learning: the tick of the baseboard heat, the low press of wind through the eaves, and under both, the silence of a hillside with no one else on it.

She was on her back. The flannel shirt had ridden up during the night and she hadn't pulled it down. The fabric rested across her hip now, its hem brushing the inside of her left thigh — soft from a hundred washes, slightly rough at the edge, warm in a way that was entirely her own warmth returned to her. She had been aware of the hem for several minutes before she admitted she was aware of it.

Six weeks. She turned the number over the way you turn a stone to see what lives under it. Six weeks since the papers, and before that — how long before that? She didn't count backward.

She had stopped counting backward when the counting started to feel like accusation. What she was aware of was a heaviness low in her stomach. Not quite ache. Something older than ache.

The kind of wanting that arrives before you have given it permission, already fully formed, already patient. Her right hand was resting on her sternum. She felt her own heartbeat against her palm and was briefly surprised by it — the steadiness of it, the indifference. The heart just continuing.

She moved her hand down slowly. Not a decision. A permission. The flannel was warm where she pressed her palm flat against it.

She held it there. The wind moved outside and the snow-light shifted almost imperceptibly, the room brightening by a shade too small to name. She felt the fabric's slight resistance — the hem, the gathered weight of it against her inner thigh — and then she felt the heat beneath, which was hers, which had been there longer than she had acknowledged. She exhaled.

The sound came out smaller than she expected, as though something had caught it partway — a soft, cut-off thing that she heard herself make with a quality close to surprise. She pressed her knees together. Not to stop. To hold.

To feel what was already there. Her left hand found the edge of the mattress and gripped it. The cotton ticking was cold where it had not been against her body. She held it.

She let her right hand slide under the hem. The skin of her own inner thigh was warmer than she was prepared for — warmer than the air, warmer than the fabric — and she felt the small shock of her own temperature as her fingers settled there and stilled. The snow-light held the room exactly as it had. Nothing had changed.

Outside, the wind moved through the trees on the hillside and came to nothing against the glass.