Nevada Dark, Still Rolling

The wheels find the joint in the rail and click, find the next one and click again, and the berth vibrates in the space between — not a shudder, something more continuous, a low hum that lives in the mattress and travels upward through everything resting on it. She has been awake for forty minutes noting this. She is good at noting things.

The curtain across the berth opening is the cheap kind, a thick polyester that muffles the aisle sounds into something underwater. Beyond it: the dark Nevada desert at two in the morning, the occasional smear of a highway light. She knows this because she looked before she lay back down. Now she is looking at the ceiling, which is close enough to touch, and she is not touching it.

The sleep shirt is her oldest one, cotton washed to near-transparency, and it has ridden up to the top of her thighs in the way it always does when she cannot be still. She has been trying to be still. The shirt's hem sits across both legs like a loose boundary, the fabric barely there against her skin, warm from her own warmth and slightly damp at the crease where her thighs have been pressed together. She is aware of the pressure of that — her own knees held against each other, the specific weight of one thigh over the other.

The glass dildo is in her bag, which is on the floor, which is fourteen inches from where her hand is resting on her stomach.

She thinks: note that. Note the fourteen inches. Note that you have been awake for forty minutes and have not reached for it yet, and note what that waiting is doing.

What it is doing is this: a slow tightening low in her abdomen that is not quite discomfort, a warmth at the back of her inner thighs that has nothing to do with the blanket she pushed off twenty minutes ago. The train takes a long curve and the vibration shifts frequency — she feels it change in the mattress beneath her, in the base of her spine, in the soles of her feet pressed flat against the berth wall. Her stomach contracts once, involuntarily, and she holds her breath without meaning to.

She lets it out slowly. It comes out longer than it went in.

She thinks: that. Note that specifically. The way the curve does something different than the straightaway. The way the body registers a frequency change before the mind does.

Her right hand is still on her stomach. Her left hand is at her side, knuckles just touching the berth wall, which is cold — the specific cold of a metal surface that has been in the dark Nevada night for hours, conducting it inward. She does not move her left hand away from it. The contrast is useful data.

The bag is still fourteen inches away. She has not decided yet. This is also data — the length of the deciding, the quality of it, the fact that her thighs have shifted almost imperceptibly apart while she was busy not deciding, the hem of the shirt moving with them, and she is aware of the air in the berth now in a way she wasn't a minute ago.

The wheels click. Click again. The vibration hums upward through everything it touches.

Her hand moves off her stomach. She wants to remember exactly where it was when she finally let it go.