Fingers Inside / Maine Cabin / Winter Night / Surrogate

The woodstove had been dying for an hour. She could see her breath now — small white shapes that formed and dissolved above the pillow, lit faint by the moonlight coming off the snow outside the window. The cold had settled into the room the way cold does in old cabins: slowly, from the corners inward, until it was everywhere except where she was. She lay on her side watching it. Her own breath, visible. She hadn't moved to feed the stove. The flannel nightgown was heavy across her legs, the brushed cotton warm where it touched her and cold where it didn't. She had been awake for a long time. Not thinking about anything, she would have said, if someone had asked — but that wasn't true. She had been thinking about him in the way she always did here, in this cabin, in this bed: not deliberately, the way you think about a problem, but the way a bruise makes itself known when you stop moving. His name had arrived in her chest sometime around midnight and hadn't left. She said it once, quietly, to the dark. The word worked. It always worked. That was the part she hadn't figured out how to be sad about yet — that saying his name still did something to her, that her body hadn't gotten the message that this was over, that memory was apparently enough. The heat that moved through her lower stomach when she said it was the same heat it had always been. Specific. His. She pressed her knees together. The flannel settled between her thighs, thick and warm, and she was aware of the pressure of it — the slight resistance of the gathered hem against the backs of her knees, the weight of the fabric across both legs. She exhaled. The breath came out longer than she meant it to, a white shape above the pillow that thinned and disappeared. Her right hand was at her side. She was aware of it the way you become aware of something you have been trying not to notice. She said his name again. Not out loud this time — just in her mouth, the shape of it, the two syllables she had said ten thousand times in ten thousand different registers. The way she'd said it laughing. The way she'd said it when she was close. The way she'd said it the last time she'd seen him, which had been an ordinary goodbye that turned out not to be. Her right hand moved to the hem. The flannel was stiff where it had been folded. She worked it up slowly, gathering it against her waist, and the cold came in against the backs of her thighs — immediate, sharp — and then her own warmth underneath, already there, already waiting for her to notice it. The contrast of it made her stomach pull tight. She stayed like that. Knees together. The nightgown bunched at her waist. Her breath making its small white shapes in the cold air above her, the woodstove settling into silence behind her, and his name sitting in her mouth like something she hadn't finished saying yet. Her right hand hovered.