I didn't sleep.
I sat on that couch for ten hours with my arms around my own ribs, and I couldn’t sleep for one minute of it.
Every time I closed my eyes, I was standing four inches from his mouth with my hand in his chain.
I've had a hand on my throat.
I've had hands on every part of me, and I’ve gone somewhere else for all of it, every time, nine years of leaving my own body at the door like a coat, and last night a man put his hand near me, and I nearly came apart in a sunroom because I could smell him.
That's the part I can't get past.
Not that I almost did it. That Iwantedto.
For years, the only thing I had was that nobody got one piece of me I didn't hand over, and I was going to hand it to him. Over a smell.
I'd have given it away standing up in a cold room with a glass of whiskey in me, to the man who left me when I needed him.
The man who is wholeheartedly responsible forwhyI am alone. Why my parents aredead.
So no, I didn't sleep.
"They come out here in the summer, and they think the whole state's an oven." Lashes doesn't turn around. "Then it's January and it's twenty-six degrees at four in the morning and everybody acts shocked. Every year. Same people."
I don't say anything.
"You've been out here since eight last night."
"I know how long it's been."
"Yeah." She rocks back on her heels. "I figured."
She lets it be silent.
The sun's coming up behind the buildings and putting a line of pink along the top of the wall. The yard's all blue underneathit, and the cold out here has a size to it that it didn't have in the room.
"You could've frozen," Lashes says.
That's all.
She doesn't say it like a mother. She says it the way you'd tell somebody their taillight's out.
You could've frozen.
It comes up out of the floor of me.
My throat opens all the way, and the noise gets out before I can get a hand on it.
My eyes are already gone, hot and streaming, and the mug's tipping, so I put it on the edge of the fire pit and get both hands on my knees.
I'm bent over in a gravel yard making a sound I haven't made since I was twenty-two years old.
Nobody's said that to me.
That's all it took.
Years locked in a room, a man who whipped me, a man who choked me, all the forced abortions, and a woman I met yesterday saysyou could've frozenlike it matters whether I'm cold, and I'm on my knees in the gravel.
Lashes doesn't touch me.
