Flannel Shirt in a Vermont Cabin, After the Funeral

The fire had been dropping for an hour. She could tell by the quality of the light — no longer amber and moving, just the dull red pulse of coals behind the stove's grate, the kind of light that doesn't illuminate so much as remind you that darkness is the default. She had not gotten up to add a log. Getting up would have required deciding to stay warm, and for three nights she had not been able to decide anything.

She was wearing her mother's flannel shirt. She hadn't meant to pack it. It had been in the bag already from the last visit, and she had not shaken it out before she left the house, and now here it was — soft from thirty years of washing, the red-and-black plaid faded to something quieter, the collar slightly frayed where her mother had a habit of pulling at it while she read. It sat against her collarbone like a hand.

She was sitting up in bed with the wool blanket across her lap, her knees together, the blanket's weight settling over both thighs. Outside: snow. Not falling anymore, just present — the particular silence of a field that has been covered and is now finished being covered. The cabin held it. The walls held it. She had been holding something too, for three days, without knowing what to do with it.

When she reached for her bag on the floor — not deciding, just reaching — her fingers found the wand before she remembered it was there. The hard plastic cylinder. The weight of it surprising her the way anything surprising surprises you after grief has flattened the textures of the world.

She held it for a moment without turning it on.

The flannel shirt was untucked, hem resting across the top of the blanket. The wool was rough against the backs of her bare thighs — she'd taken her leggings off at some point, she didn't remember when — and the contrast between the rough blanket below and the soft worn flannel above was so specific and so physical that she felt it behind her sternum before she felt it anywhere else. A peripheral contraction. Something recognizing itself.

She exhaled, and the sound that came out was shorter than she'd expected. Not quite a breath. Not quite anything else.

She set the wand against her thigh, still outside the blanket. The plastic was cool where it touched her — not cold, just room-temperature in a room that had been slowly losing its warmth — and she felt the difference between that and her own skin with a precision that surprised her. She was warm. She was still warm.

Her left hand rested flat on the mattress beside her hip. Her right hand held the wand, the grip loose, the switch under her thumb but not yet pressed.

The coals in the stove pulsed once, dim red, and then settled.

She looked at the ceiling — the same water stain she'd been looking at for three nights, shaped like nothing, shaped like everything if you were tired enough — and held a breath in, and held it, and did not let it go.

The blanket was heavy across her knees. The flannel was her mother's. The wand was cool in her right hand, and she was warm, and outside the snow was done falling, and she was still here.

She pressed her knees together once, feeling the wool between them, and then — slowly, the blanket shifting with a dry whisper — she let them part.