Flannel Sleep Shirt in a Montreal Blizzard Morning

Outside the bedroom window, Montreal had erased itself. The glass was frosted to its edges, the street beyond it gone, the commute gone, the 9 a.m. call gone — all of it absorbed into a white that made no sound and asked nothing of her. She had been watching that window for ten minutes from the floor, which was where she had ended up after checking her phone, after reading the transit alert, after setting the phone face-down on the hardwood and simply not getting up.

The floor was cold through the flannel. She registered this the way she registered most things — as data, as something worth noting. The shirt had ridden up on her left side where she'd shifted her weight, and the exposed strip of skin at her hip met the hardwood with a small, specific shock that she let herself feel fully before it faded to nothing.

She had not planned this. That was the thing she kept returning to, in the methodical way her mind returned to things. She had not planned to lie here. She had not planned to reach for the wand where it lived in the drawer of the nightstand, had not planned to bring it down to the floor with her as though it were obvious. But here it was, the low hum of it rising through the flannel, and here she was, noting the quality of the vibration the way she might note the quality of light: diffuse, distant, arriving through a medium that softened it.

Her left arm lay at her side, wrist up. The cold air in the room — the radiator was still waking — settled against the thin skin of her inner wrist and stayed there, distinct from the warmth of the rest of her. She found herself monitoring it. The precise temperature of the air at that specific surface. This was something she did: she took notes on herself, in her own head, as though she were a subject worth studying.

The wand buzzed on. She had not moved it. She had let it rest at the inside of her thigh, just above the knee, where the flannel was thinner from washing, and she was waiting — not with impatience, but with the particular attention she brought to anything she wanted to understand. Her knees were still together. She was aware of this. She was aware of the weight of her own legs, the slight heaviness of them, the way gravity had made a decision about her that she hadn't made yet herself.

A breath left her — longer than the one before it, not quite steady at the end. She hadn't chosen it. It arrived and she let it go, and the frosted window held its white silence, and the world outside stayed cancelled, and her wrist stayed cold, and the hum continued at the inside of her thigh.

She thought: I could stay here.

Her right hand rested on her sternum, feeling her own exhale rise and fall under her palm. Her left hand did not move. The wand did not move. But her knees — she noticed this the way she noticed the wrist, the way she noticed the window — her knees were no longer quite as certain as they had been.