Six Weeks of Nothing

The city was already awake. She could hear it from the seventh floor — a delivery truck idling, a streetcar bell two blocks east, the low continuous hum of a summer morning building toward itself. Toronto in July didn't wait for anyone. She had forgotten that she used to like that about it.

She had found the wand at the back of the closet shelf while looking for something else. It had been there all six weeks. She hadn't been avoiding it exactly. She had been avoiding what it would mean to want it.

The sundress was the one she slept in — thin white cotton, washed so many times it had gone soft in a way that felt almost liquid against her thighs. She hadn't changed out of it. She was standing at the edge of the bed in bare feet on hardwood, the morning light coming through the linen curtains in that particular early way, not yellow yet, still the color of something about to happen.

She sat on the edge of the bed. Then, without fully deciding to, she bent forward over it, forearms resting on the duvet, the wand in her right hand, her left pressed flat against the mattress beside her hip.

The weight of her own body settled. She felt the backs of her thighs against the bed frame's edge, the slight compression of it, the specific temperature of the wood through the cotton — cooler than she expected. Her stomach contracted once, sharply, before she had done anything at all.

She held the wand against the outside of her thigh and turned it on.

The hum entered her palm before it entered anywhere else. She felt it in her wrist, in the small bones of her hand. She had forgotten that part — the way it moved through you before you pointed it anywhere. She exhaled through her nose, a breath that came out longer than she had put in.

Six weeks. Her mind tried to do something with that number and couldn't.

She moved her right hand inward. The cotton was so thin. She pressed the head of the wand against the fabric and the fabric gave nothing — there was almost nothing there to give. The vibration moved through it as though it wasn't there at all, and the sound she made was short, cut off somewhere in her chest before she had decided to cut it off.

Her left hand gripped the duvet.

Her thighs were together. Both of them, pressed. The pressure of her own legs holding against the thing she had just introduced between them — the wanting she had apparently been storing without knowing she was storing it.

She stayed like that. Not moving. Just present inside the sensation, her body doing something slow and enormous and half-remembered.

Below, the city kept rising. A siren somewhere on King Street, moving east. The ordinary sound of everything continuing.

She pressed a little harder, and her knees parted — just slightly, just enough — and she understood that she was only at the beginning of remembering.