Bullet Vibrator on an Acadia Trail in October Fog

The fog had been thickening since the first switchback, and by the time she was half a mile out it had swallowed everything — the birches, the trail markers, the grey shape of Cadillac in the distance. Twenty feet of visibility, maybe less. The world had contracted to this: cold granite at her back, wet October air on her face, the muffled sound of wind moving through leaves she couldn't see. She had stepped off the path without deciding to. One moment she was walking; the next she was standing in the moss beside a low ledge, her pack still on, her breath making small clouds that the fog absorbed immediately.

She had clipped it inside her waistband at the car. A dare — the word she'd used to herself, because dare felt lighter than the other word, the one that was more accurate. She'd stood in the parking lot with her hands inside her jacket, working the small clip through the waistband of her base layer while two other hikers loaded poles twenty feet away, and she'd felt her pulse in her throat the entire time. The bullet was the length of her thumb. Lighter than she expected. She'd barely felt it on the drive up.

She felt it now.

The granite ledge was cold through her pack, cold through the back of her jacket where it pressed. She leaned into it and let the weight of the pack settle her, let gravity do what it wanted. The base layer was thin — she'd chosen it for the climb, for wicking, not for this — and it lay smooth across her stomach, smooth across the waistband where the small hard shape sat against her hip. She became aware of the fabric in a way she hadn't been for the entire walk up. The specific pull of it. The way it moved when she breathed.

She looked straight ahead into the fog. Nothing. A suggestion of a spruce, maybe. The sound of a branch somewhere to her left, probably just wind. Probably.

Her right hand moved to her hip. Not yet — she was still deciding, or still pretending to decide, which was its own thing, its own particular pleasure she'd learned to extend. The bullet was right there beneath her palm, the shape of it readable through the fabric. She pressed her palm flat and felt the hard cylinder and did not move it. Just held it. Her breath came in normally and went out longer, a slow leak she didn't plan.

Anyone could walk out of that fog.

That was the thing. That had always been the thing. She understood this about herself without judgment — the way the possibility worked on her, the way not-knowing sharpened everything. No one was coming. Almost certainly no one was coming. But the fog made certainty impossible, and impossibility was the point.

She shifted the bullet with her thumb. Just repositioned it. The thin synthetic moved with it, and the pressure landed somewhere that made her press back against the granite and hold very still. Her left hand found the ledge beside her hip and gripped the cold wet stone. Her knees were still together. For now.

The fog held its position around her, grey and absolute and close.