Still City, Two Days Deep

The silence had a weight to it. Not the ordinary silence of late night in the city — the kind with traffic underneath, a siren threading through every few minutes, the low hum of everything still moving. This was the silence of Boston buried, the silence of two feet of snow pressing down on every surface until the city forgot it had ever made noise. She had been awake inside it for an hour, maybe two, lying still enough that the radiator's tick seemed loud, seemed personal.

The lamp in the corner was on. She hadn't turned it off when she came to bed and now she was glad. Its light reached the window and met the snow-diffused glow from the street below — that particular orange-white that only exists when a blizzard is still falling — and between them they made the room something other than dark. She could see the glass. She could see the snow still coming.

She was wearing the thermal shirt she'd had since college, the waffle-knit one, the hem of which ended somewhere mid-thigh. Nothing else. She'd stopped thinking about that hours ago.

At some point — she couldn't have named when — she had become aware of herself. Not her thoughts. Herself. The specific warmth held in the fabric across her thighs, the way the shirt lay against her lower stomach when she shifted, the crease at the back of her knee against the sheet. Her body presenting itself to her attention the way something forgotten presents itself when you finally stop moving: quietly, without accusation, simply there.

She sat up. She looked at the window for a long moment. The snow kept falling past it in the orange-white light, unhurried, continuous, as if it would never stop.

She moved to kneel.

The shift in position changed everything about the shirt — the hem rose, the fabric pooled at her hips, and the cold air of the room touched the backs of her thighs in a way that made her breath catch before she had decided to catch it. She pressed her face into the pillow. Her hands were at her sides. Her right hand. She was aware of it the way you become aware of a door before you open it: the fact of it, the possibility, the gap between where it was and where it wasn't yet.

The radiator ticked. The snow fell.

Her hips were lifted. The shirt hung away from her body, making a tent of itself, and underneath that tent was the heat she had not acknowledged in months — not weeks, months — the particular warmth of a body that has been starving so long it has stopped asking. She exhaled into the pillow, slow, and the exhale came out longer than she meant to give it, unfolding against the cotton until there was nothing left in her lungs.

Her right hand moved.

The blizzard silence held.