Twelve Minutes, Indiana Flat

The farmland out the window is the same as it was twenty miles ago. Flat. Pale. A tree line so thin it barely interrupts the grey.

I keep my eyes on it because it requires nothing from me, and right now everything I have is going toward the other thing. The café car smells like burnt drip coffee and someone's microwaved sandwich. Two seats up, a man in a fleece vest is reading something on his phone. Across the aisle, a woman with headphones is asleep against the window, her breath fogging a small oval on the glass.

Nobody is looking at me. I have confirmed this four times in the last four minutes. I am sitting very still. The jeans are dark, straight-cut, the kind that don't give much.

The waistband sits at my hips like a fact. Every time the train takes a slight curve — and there are slight curves, even here, even through this nowhere — the denim presses and the base shifts and I have to make a decision about my face. I make it. My face does what I tell it to do.

This is something I am good at. What I did not account for is the seam. I had thought mostly about insertion, about the logistics of the bathroom two cars back, about the specific silicone warmth that had surprised me even though I had planned for it. I had not thought about the inseam.

I had not thought about twelve minutes of sitting at a corner table with my knees together and the train doing what trains do — this low, continuous rocking, nothing dramatic, nothing you'd notice unless you were trying not to notice it — and the seam finding the exact pressure point it has found and staying there. I pick up my phone. I set it down. The exhale that comes out is shorter than I intend, clipped somewhere behind my sternum before I have decided to clip it.

The man in the fleece vest does not look up. I press my lips together and look back at the window. The farmland is still there. Still flat.

A silo in the middle distance, grey-white against grey sky, gone before I finish registering it. I am full and the train is moving and these are the only two facts that matter right now. My right hand is on the table, palm down, fingers loose against the laminate. My left hand is in my lap.

Not moving. The denim is warm where my thigh presses the inside of my wrist, warmer than the table, warmer than the air coming from the vent above the window. I am aware of the specific temperature of this in a way that makes it hard to think about anything else. I should check my phone.

I have things to check. I reach for it and my fingers are not quite steady and I know before I look what I will smell, what I will taste if I bring my knuckles to my mouth, which I will not do. Not yet. Not here.

I set the phone face-down and look back out the window.