The cut on your lip blossoms open when I kiss you. It breaks, from a quiet and delicate place, you slip softly into my growling throat. I expect you to flinch, you never do– just still, and erect, a slim and sturdy tree, as the wind whips around you, around us.

The cut on your lip blossoms open when I kiss you, there in front of Morton’s, the liquor store on Main Street, you must have bought vodka there in high school… you are so completely of this place. I taste it in your blood. I smelled it in your sweat, that morning in your office, again, now, in this empty mid afternoon in this empty town in this empty December. 

The whole world stops, here. Closes its eyes, its doors, its heart. I always forget things like that.

Not you, though. You, you remember everything.

The wreath on the door has gone to hay, gray and fragile. It no longer smells of balsam, just the potentiality of firesmoke. I bury my face in the cool, pale skin of your neck, goosebumps and greying stumble prickling my cheek. I wish I could sink my teeth into you. You place your hands on either side of my head. Through the soft, dense meat of your palms, I can just barely hear a siren wail. Shouldn’t I be holding you? 

Shouldn’t I be protecting Janet? 

***

Janet looks exactly like the picture in your wallet– teal turtleneck and big polymer clay earrings in the shape of dolphins. I love that picture, more than you do, probably, I love that you chose her. 

The wine has made you quiet, in your armchair by the fire, roaring and anxious. Crosslegged on the floor in Janet’s flannel nightgown, the skin of my thighs prickles against the rough wood floorboards, cold slipping up through the cracks between them. A summer house on a frozen black lake, this place is not built for us now, and I feel it, we all feel it, all stuck up to our knees in a passable silence like thick snow. It is sufferable. Janet’s knitting needles clack and scrape against each other, the fire snaps, your thumb wicks moisture from your tongue and distributes it onto the edge of your playing cards. Solitaire. My hands are empty. My breath is shallow.

I feel your distance from me. Three feet of bare floor and twenty years of Janet.

In the low light, the dolphins on Janet’s earlobes seem to dance and dip, leaping in and out of waves of shadow. What do they whisper to her? What do they see, and understand, in that deep darkness, devoid of even the weakest fractals of fireshine . . . a place beneath, locked. 

***

“Do you have everything you need?”

The room adjoining the one you share with Janet, where you and Janet sleep together and read books together and check each other’s moles for cancer… the room adjoining that one has garlands strung with paper cranes hung from the ceiling. Sigh, and they shift, rustling against each other, whispering. On my back, spine pressing into the mothball scented quilt, I gaze up at them.

“Do you have everything you need?”

I roll onto my side. Janet, in a flannel nightgown just like mine, sets a glass of water on the floor next to the air mattress. I nod. I smile at her. “Do they have names? The dolphins.”

She lifts a gentle fingertip to her ear. She smiles back. “No.”

She walks towards the door, setting the cranes all a flutter. “Happy New Year.” She bestows this phrase like a gift, one she is bound by morality and instinct to give and I cannot give it back to her. 

The door closes. The cranes whisper. Outside, for once, the wind is completely still, and devoid of opinion.

To name a thing is to give it power.

All night, I wait for the sound of your patient footsteps on the hallway rug. I imagine that I am trapped under the ice of the black lake, throwing my fists against it, smooshing the pomegranate flesh of my frostbitten cheeks up against it until something melts, breaks, or changes. 

***

The front door opens with a scream. The January dawn is sharp toothed and glistening. 

A fresh layer of snow has fallen in the night. It crunches under my bare feet like fragile bones, bird skeletons kept in glass boxes on the walls of biologists’ offices. Like paper cranes.

My breath is coming faster, dashing and sliding down my throat. The world looms around me, the long fingers of the silvery pine trees reaching towards my body. My knees buckle. I curl forwards, pressing my nose into the fleshy part of my bicep, the back of my hand braced against the side of my neck.

The sun has barely risen. The clear imperceptible blue gray of the sky is bruised with flashes of pink and gold and white. The naked apple trees and blueberry bushes are watching me.

Why are you here? They whisper. This is not meant to be.

I bite the inside of my arms until I taste blood. 

The wind sings around my body. Its voice tries to undress me. It lilts between my thighs, trickling up and down my spine, over my abdomen, trilling circles around my breasts. I hover there, toes turning blue, breath sprinting in and out of me, Janet’s nightgown whipping this way and that. The cold is a punishment for my stupid, silent confession. No one dares come near me.

***

On the train back to New York, I watch the trees morph into highrises.