Frozen Lake, His Flannel

The lake makes no sound at midnight in February. That's the thing she forgot — how the ice takes everything. No lapping. No give.

Just the wind finding the gaps in the cabin siding and, underneath it, a silence so complete it has texture, like the flannel she pressed against her face before she lay down. His shirt. The one he left on the hook by the door three winters ago, when leaving things behind was still an accident. She'd put it on without deciding to.

That was the truth of it. She'd come up alone to close the place for the season, found it on the hook, and the next thing she knew it was on her body and the lamp was on and she was lying on top of the covers with her knees together and the cold coming up through the mattress despite the woodstove working in the other room. The shirt smelled mostly like the cabin now. Cedar.

Dry air. The faint ghost of the pine logs stacked against the outside wall. But at the collar, if she turned her face into it just right, there was something else. Something that made her chest do a slow, careful thing she wasn't ready to name.

She held the collar against her jaw and looked at the ceiling. The bedside lamp threw weak yellow light across the planks above her. A water stain up there she remembered from three winters ago, when he'd pointed at it and said something that made her laugh so hard she'd had to press her face into his shoulder to muffle herself. The stain was still there.

Everything else had changed and the stain was still there. Her left hand was pressed flat against her sternum, holding the shirt closed. Her right hand was at her side, not moving. She was aware of the weight of the shirt across her thighs.

The way the hem had ridden up when she lay down, so the flannel covered her to mid-thigh and no further. The air in the room was warm from the stove but the backs of her knees were cool where nothing covered them, and that contrast — warm fabric above, cool air below — was where her attention kept going, even when she tried to keep it on the ceiling, on the stain, on nothing. She exhaled. It came out longer than she'd intended, unfolding slowly into the quiet room before she could decide how much of it to give.

The rabbit was on the nightstand. She'd taken it out of her bag and set it there without ceremony, the way you set down your keys. Practical. Not a decision, just a placement.

The cord curled beside it. She didn't reach for it yet. Instead she turned her face further into the collar and let herself have one full breath of it — that almost-him, that cedar-and-something — and felt her knees press together once, a small involuntary thing, the body making an argument she hadn't agreed to make yet. Outside, the ice shifted.

A low, structural groan that traveled the length of the lake and arrived at the cabin like a question.