Wand Vibrator in a Toronto Condo, Six Days After

The Amazon box had been sitting on the kitchen counter for six days. She'd walked past it every time she refilled her water glass, every time she stood in front of the open refrigerator not wanting anything in it. The label faced outward. The tape was still sealed. She'd ordered it on a Tuesday, the week before the call came, and it had arrived two days after the funeral like a small bureaucratic joke, left by the courier on the mat outside her door.

It was four in the morning when she finally picked it up.

She didn't turn on the kitchen light. The streetlight came through the blinds in thin horizontal lines that fell across the counter, across the box, across her hands as she pulled at the tape. The sound of it — that particular tearing — was the loudest thing in the condo. The only thing. Outside, somewhere on Bathurst, a truck passed and was gone. Then silence again, the particular silence of Toronto at this hour, which was not really silence but the absence of human voices, and that was close enough.

She carried it to the bedroom floor. Not the bed. The floor, with her back against the side of the mattress and her knees drawn up, the worn cotton of her t-shirt pooled between her thighs. The shirt had been her mother's once, or maybe it had always been hers — she couldn't remember anymore and the not-remembering sat in her chest like something swallowed wrong. She pressed her knees together. The fabric pulled tight across both thighs, holding its own small warmth against her skin.

The wand was heavier than she'd expected. Substantial. She held it in her right hand and her left hand stayed flat against the hardwood floor, palm down, grounding her to the cold of it — the floor was cold in a way the rest of the room wasn't, and the contrast moved through her palm and up her wrist and registered somewhere at the back of her throat.

She hadn't cried in two days. She hadn't slept more than three hours at a stretch. She had eaten crackers and drunk tea and answered emails with complete grammatical sentences and she had not fallen apart in front of anyone, not once, because falling apart felt like the one thing she absolutely could not afford.

This felt different. This felt like something she was choosing.

She looked at the window — the blinds, the lines of streetlight crossing the ceiling — and held still for a moment that stretched longer than she meant it to. The wand in her right hand. The cold floor under her left. Her knees still pressed together, the t-shirt taut across them, her own heat already there, already present, which surprised her. She hadn't expected that. She'd expected to feel nothing, or to feel grief, and instead there was this — her body making its own argument, quiet and specific and not asking permission.

Her breath went out slowly through her nose. Longer than the inhale. She hadn't planned it.

Her right hand moved toward her thigh. Not yet touching. Just — close. The wand's head hovering near the hem of the shirt, near the place where the frayed cotton met her bare skin. The moment before was its own kind of pressure: the awareness of what she was about to allow, the smallness of the gap between not yet and now.

The box sat on the kitchen counter, empty, its tape pulled back like an open mouth. She didn't think about it. She thought about nothing except the cold floor beneath her palm and the warmth she was already carrying and the slow, deliberate decision to let herself have this one thing.

Her knees began to part.