What the Drawer Kept

The pasture through the bedroom window had gone the color of old bone. She had been looking at it for ten minutes without meaning to, sitting on the edge of the bed in her flannel shirt with her hands in her lap, watching the frost hold the grass flat and still under the white winter sky. There was no sound in the house. There was no sound anywhere she could find.

The drawer was still closed.

She had bought the thing in April, a Tuesday, from a website she had opened and closed three times before she let the purchase go through. It had arrived in a plain box and she had put it in the nightstand drawer without unwrapping it, and eight months had passed the way months pass on a ranch — full of everything else. Today the house was empty until sundown. She had known that when she woke up. She had known it all through the morning without letting herself know she knew.

She put her left hand flat on the quilt beside her. The cotton was cold where the afternoon light didn't reach it, and the contrast made her aware of her own warmth in a way that surprised her — the heat of her thigh under the flannel, present and specific, hers.

Her stomach contracted once, low, before she had decided anything.

She opened the drawer.

The glass caught the pale window light and held it. She had not expected it to be so solid-looking, so plain and unapologetic. She sat with it in her right hand for a moment, feeling its weight, its temperature — cold from the drawer, from the months, from all the waiting she had done without calling it waiting. The cold of it moved against her palm. She set it on the quilt beside her left hand and looked at it.

Outside, the pasture didn't move. Nothing out there was watching her. That was the thing about this particular silence — it had no opinion.

She undid the bottom two buttons of the flannel shirt. Her hands were steady, which surprised her. The hem fell back across her thighs and she was aware of the fabric's weight, the slight drag of it against her skin as she shifted her knees apart by an inch, just an inch, just enough to feel the air change in the space between.

Her right hand moved to her thigh. Not far. Just to the top of it, just to the hem's edge, where the flannel ended and her skin began.

The exhale that came out of her was longer than the one that had gone in. She hadn't planned its length. It unfolded into the cold room on its own, and when it was done she sat in the quiet with the glass beside her and her hand at the border of the flannel and the pale land still holding its color through the glass.

She had been the woman who put it in the drawer.

She picked it up.