Four Days, Frozen Lake

The lake had not moved in four days. She could see it from the bed — that flat white expanse through the single window, the ice so thick and even it looked painted, the far treeline dark against a sky that had been the same pale grey since she arrived. She had stopped checking the time. The light did not change enough to make it worth the effort.

She lay on her back under the quilt, still in the thermal underwear she'd slept in, and watched her breath rise and disperse above her face. The cabin held the cold the way old wood does — not drafty, just honest. The air near the ceiling was different from the air at her lips. She could see that difference. She had been watching it for a while.

The glass rested between her palms, pressed flat against her sternum beneath the quilt. She had taken it from the bag two mornings ago and not used it — had only held it at night, feeling it pull the warmth from her hands and then, slowly, give it back. There was something she liked about that exchange. The way it required patience. The way it kept a record of exactly how long she had been holding it.

Now she could feel that it had reached her. Not warm the way skin is warm, but no longer cold. The specific weight of it settled against the hollow below her throat, and she pressed her palms a little closer, and her stomach contracted once, without warning, low and inward — not from touch but from the knowledge of what she was going to do.

She exhaled. The cloud above her face came out longer than the one before it.

Her knees were together. The waffle-knit fabric lay across both thighs in a single flat line, the slight weight of it familiar now, four days familiar, the pilling at the inner seam something her fingers had found in the dark without looking. She was aware of the fabric the way she was aware of the lake — constantly, peripherally, as a fact of the space she was in.

She moved the glass down slowly, still between both palms, still held. Her left hand would stay outside the quilt. She had already decided this, the way she had already decided other things this morning without announcing them to herself.

The moment before she moved her right hand further was very long.

She let it be long. Outside, the lake held its shape exactly. Her breath rose and thinned and was gone, and she watched it go, and her knees were still together, and the glass was warm now — genuinely warm — and she had not yet done anything at all.