“Don’t lie to me! You’re emitting pheromones! You’reinceptingme with public indecency!”
I couldn’t stop the smile from hooking at my mouth. “So you’re thinking about it too.”
She shook her head hard enough that dark waves tossed around her face. “Get thee behind me! We have research to do! And if you get spunk on their archival materials, Opal and Fabienne will never forgive you.”
I had to concede the point about the spunk. But I did pout a little as I took the first box of microfilm and loaded it into the machine the way Opal had showed me.
“Stop doing the horny puppy-dog eyes,” muttered Sunny as she sat down and pulled a volume of bound newspapers in front of her. “It’s weakening my resolve to be a good muse matchmaker.”
“Why can’tyoube my muse again?” It was almost a whine, but I was too grumpy to be embarrassed.
“Because you don’t want me for a muse, trust me,” she said lightly, although there was something rehearsed about the way she spoke, like she was quoting a memorized line. “I don’t meet the muse prereqs.”
“The only prereq is me liking you.”And being obsessed with the smell of your shampoo. And the way you laugh. And also wanting to feel your nipple piercings on my tongue seventeen times a day.
“No, Isaac,” she said, suddenly gentle. “The first prerequisite is that someone has towantto be your muse.”
Jesus Christ.
I turned to the microfilm machine, grateful that it was in a corner and she’d see only my back. And not my face, which was probably cycling through every expression in mywounded lonelinesscollection, which was admittedly vast.
I heard her take in a breath, like she was going to say something else, and I stayed completely still, not sure if she was going to hammer the rusty ice skate home or take it backand confess that all she wanted was to be mine and let me write songs about her messy room and colorful tattoos—but then I heard her exhale in a long shudder and shift in her chair. There was the creak of an old clothbound spine and then the slow flip of a page.
She wasn’t going to say anything else.
And it was fine. What did I care? She’d promised to find me a muse, and any muse would do, and we would fool around in the meantime, and it was fine. I was fine.
I was so fine that I wasn’t hyperaware of her every sigh and squirm behind me, of the shushing drift of her fingertips down the newspaper pages. Of the three times in the next hour that she got up to stretch or pace or poke through the other shelves. Of the two times in the hour after that when she went upstairs, of the third time she came back down wielding a can of something orange for herself and a can of sparkling water for me.
She set it next to me wordlessly, backing away like she’d just lowered a goat into a Tyrannosaurus enclosure, and Ihatedthis weird energy between us. Fuck.
I shoved the needy feelings I had about her into a mental laundry basket and then kicked that under a mental bed. She was my best friend’s wife’s best friend. She was my roommate and fellow rudderless nepo baby. She had every right not to want to be my muse. Just because she’d been honest about not wanting to be involved with me beyond a roommates-with-bennies level didn’t mean our whole vibe had to change.
“Found anything interesting yet?” I asked casually, an olive branch.
“It’s mostly just war stuff,” she said. The words were a little cautious, like she was still waiting to see if I was about to charge the T. rex fence. “The volumes are the Sunday editions andthe special editions, and so it’s mostly the big news. What was happening in Europe and in the Pacific. What about you?”
The microfilm spools were the daily issues of the papers, and I’d started right before Christmas, and then found nothing, so I started backtracking through December, in case the Comet version of the story had gotten the dates wrong. “Nothing so far. Just ration recipes, amateur poetry, and cigarette ads. I feel like a blizzard would be big news, but maybe I’m not looking closely enough.” I wiped my hand over my face. Going through the microfilm was a lot more tedious than my mom’s show had made it seem, since about 50percent of looking at microfilm was wrestling with the machine to get it to zoom and focus so that you could read anything at all. “I don’t know. Maybe this was a shit idea. It’s not like newspapers have sections for miracle announcements.”
Sunny wedged her tongue into the corner of her mouth, her gaze squinting at nothing. And then she abruptly yanked a couple of discarded volumes back over to her, flipping them open.
I tried to be inspired by her renewed research vigor and went back to the microfilm. I was almost done with December, save for the days after Christmas, and with a sense of defeat, I loaded the last roll. There’d been no paper for Christmas Eve or Christmas, or even the day after. I was about to crack open my sparkling water and shotgun it just for the small dopamine hit when I saw the front page for December 27.
Snow Grips Piney Notch; Seven Reported Dead
“Oh shit,” I murmured, leaning closer to read. And there it was, the blizzard we were looking for. It had shut down the entire state, including the offices of thePiney Notch Gazette; it hadstranded trains and killed livestock and frozen a few unlucky souls in snow-marooned cars. There was no mention of angels, but the article did have two lines mentioning that the mail truck had been found parked near the town square on Christmas morning, all of the letters and packages still safely inside. The town authorities made sure everything was delivered, much to the delight of the Piney Notch children, who’d had gifts upon gifts waiting in the truck.
“Isaac!” Sunny called, just as I said, “I found the blizzard.”
I turned to see her circling a hand frantically at me. “I think I found something too!”
I left the machine to go stand behind her, telling her about the blizzard and the presents in the town square as I went. After I finished, I braced my hand on the table and leaned over her shoulder to read the page her clothbound volume was open to.
“You said the wordannouncements, and I’m such a floppy dildo, because I didn’t even think—” She tapped the paper, too excited to finish her own sentence. “We’ve been going at this the wrong way around!”
I read the words next to her finger.Vermont Army War Dead, 1944. Beneath was a depressingly long list of names, and at the end—
“Three Christmas Notch—sorry, Piney Notch—men died at the end of December 1944,” Sunny said. “One of these must be the husband-slash-angel. And if we can find his widow...”
