After the Call, Austin Rain

The windows had already started when she climbed into the back. Just at the edges first — a soft erasure working inward from the corners of the glass — and she watched it happen the way you watch something you didn't ask for arrive anyway. She hadn't planned this. That was the thing she kept circling.

The wand was in the gym bag because she'd been optimistic about the gym, and the gym bag was in the car because she hadn't gone, and she hadn't gone because he had called at eleven and it was now past noon and her hands were still not entirely hers. She set the phone face-down on the seat beside her. The rain on the roof of the car was steady and specific — not a downpour, not a drizzle, but the particular middle register of an Austin spring afternoon that means it will keep going for exactly as long as it wants to. She had heard it through the whole call, punctuating things she didn't want punctuated.

Now it was just weather. Now it was just sound. She pulled the wand out without ceremony. That was the part she didn't want to examine: how little ceremony it took.

No decision she could point to. The bag was between her feet, her hand went in, and then the wand was in her lap and the windows were fogging and the parking lot was becoming theoretical. She was not sad. She had checked.

She was not angry, exactly. Anger had a direction and this didn't — it was more like pressure without an address, the specific weight of having held a voice in her ear for twenty minutes past the point her body had agreed to. Her knees were together. The hem of the shorts cut across mid-thigh, the fabric soft and slightly warm from where she'd been sitting.

She was aware of the warmth before she was aware of anything else — her own heat, contained, waiting without impatience for her to decide what to do with it. The wand sat in her right hand. Her left hand was flat on the seat beside her, palm down, pressing into the upholstery the way a hand does when it has nowhere else to be. She exhaled.

The sound came out longer than she'd put in — something unfolded in the middle of it that she hadn't intended to release, and she felt it leave her chest and go nowhere, absorbed by the rain, the fogged glass, the car's interior doing its quiet work of becoming a room. Her thumb found the button. She didn't press it yet. The windows were more than half opaque now.

The H-E-B sign was a smear of red through the glass, the parking lot dissolved into shapes, and she was — for the first time since eleven o'clock — alone in a way that counted. Her knees were still together. Her thumb was still on the button. She was not going to think about why she deserved this.