Third Night, Firelight

The light above the bed flickered once, held, then gave up entirely for four seconds before returning. She had stopped flinching at it. By the second night she had learned to wait it out, eyes on the fire instead, and now the flicker felt less like a failure of the grid and more like punctuation — the cabin reminding her where the real light was. She sat cross-legged on the bed with the instruction sheet folded across her knee, the paper gone soft at the creases from two previous readings.

Outside, the snow had been falling since noon. She could hear it not falling — that particular silence, packed and close, the kind that makes a room feel smaller and more deliberate than it actually is. Occasionally the wind found a gap somewhere in the eaves and made a low, sustained note, like something inhaling. The rabbit lay on the duvet beside her right knee.

She had taken it out of its pouch before reading, which was different from the first two nights. Progress, she thought, without irony. She was a person who made checklists. She was a person who read the manual.

The fact that she had read this particular manual three times now and still felt she was preparing rather than beginning was information about her, not about the manual. She read the diagram one more time. The external arm. The internal curve.

The suggested angle of approach — suggested, as if the diagram knew it was only a suggestion, as if whoever drew it understood that the body would have corrections to offer. She folded the paper and set it on the nightstand, face down. The overhead light flickered. The fire took over.

In the amber shift everything looked warmer, closer, more decided. Her right hand moved to her thigh without her quite deciding to move it. The waffle-knit cotton was warm from her own heat, the ribbed texture pressing faint lines into her palm when she rested it there. She was aware of the weight of the fabric across both thighs, the hem sitting an inch or two above her knee, the specific temperature differential between the cotton and the air below it.

She exhaled. The sound came out longer than she had intended — not quite a sigh, something that had started as a neutral breath and changed its mind partway through. Her left hand was flat against the duvet. She noticed this.

She noticed that she had not picked up the rabbit yet, that her right hand was still on her own thigh, that the diagram was face down and the fire was the only teacher left in the room. Her knees were still together. The hem of the henley lay across them, held in place by its own modest weight. She picked up the rabbit with her left hand.

Held it. The silicone was cool against her palm — a precise, particular coolness against the warmth she had already accumulated — and she turned it once, slowly, learning its shape the way the diagram had never quite managed to teach her. Her right hand stayed where it was, on her thigh, and did not move. Not yet.