Gold Light, Back Forty

The light is still deciding what it wants to be when I come out. Not sunrise yet — something before that, a pale reddening along the mesquite line that turns the back forty into a held breath. I have been holding mine since four a.m. The tailgate is cold against the backs of my thighs.

That's the first real thing — the cold metal through the thin cotton, the shock of it, the way my body pulls inward for a half-second before it accepts the temperature and then accepts it completely. The sleep dress is old enough that I don't know whose it was. It belongs to no particular drawer, no particular decade. It sits on my shoulders like it has always been there and it ends at the top of my thighs and there is nothing under it but me.

I can smell the barn from here. Hay and something older than hay, the specific animal warmth of a building that holds living things. It has been in my nose since I woke and couldn't sleep and lay there in the dark listening to the ranch breathe and felt the wanting start up in me the way it does — not a question but a conclusion. Not yet.

Not yet. And then: why not yet. I sit on the tailgate with my knees together and my left hand flat on the metal beside my hip, grounding myself against the cold. The right hand is in my lap.

Not moving. I am watching the mesquite. The gold is starting. A specific gold, not a general one — the kind that moves across flat land like it has somewhere to be, touching the top of one mesquite and then the next, working its way toward me at a pace that feels intentional.

I watch it. My thighs press together and then, slowly, they don't. The wanting has been in me for two hours. It has the quality of something that has waited long enough to stop being polite about it.

There is a heat between my legs that has nothing to do with the morning, which is still cool, which will not be cool for long. I am aware of the fabric resting against the inside of my thigh — the hem, the specific weightlessness of washed cotton — and I am aware of what is on the other side of it. My right hand shifts. Not far.

Enough that I feel it shift. The fabric moves with it and the cool air touches skin that has been covered, and I take a breath in through my nose — slow, deliberate, the barn smell in it — and let it back out over a count that runs longer than I meant to give it. The sun is almost at the top of the mesquite. Almost.

My knees part another inch. The hem rides. I feel the tailgate's cold edge against the back of my left thigh and the open air against the inside of my right one and my right hand rests at the top of that space, not yet pressing, just present — the warmth of my own palm a question I have already answered.