You could come here and we could go out and open the south gate, strew hay along the tin troughs for the cattle to graze, their warm broad noses finding it ahead of the falling snow. After that we could walk to the small pond, our breaths mirrored in the air, as our forms are mirrors of the other, small breasts, thin hips. The pond would be frozen over with half a foot of ice. Steady enough to walk. We could slide around on it in our boots and pretend we are at a skate rink like the scenes in the movies. Like in New York City. Maybe we could hack a hole in the ice and sit around on chairs and put a line down in the water for some fish. We may be high enough in the mountains for that, these glacial lakes, for the ice to be thick enough and the water beneath it deep enough and moving, so that animals still exist in that chilled kingdom, in the blue, fading-to-black depths, without eyes, they do not need eyes for that life. Probably the line for fishing like that is ten feet or more. We could do that perhaps, or perhaps not, here.
But still, we could walk back after the skating and see the pines swaying slowly in the frigid air. So slow as to be a thing untenable.
Inside we would build a fire because even with the furnace that is the best way to keep one room warm. It would mumble in the stone hearth and the glow would light on the stones and on the walls around us. We are primitives in a primitive cave. What will we find, my shadow. Our boots we would have taken off by the door over the cellar steps, the ice and clumps of snow to melt. Our socks would warm next to the blaze as we sit in front of it, eating crackers and ham taken from the fridge, food that makes us feel like vagrants, or guests. We could drink wine to warm the throat. Our cheeks would be red like village children’s. Your long hair would look so soft and yellow against your blue sweater. Mine long like the drooping twigs of a bird’s nest.
Our fingers touch on the floor, the tips of them, splayed, shy, and you would talk about your brothers, one down in California, in the sun, standing in a kitchen dicing, with practiced ease, a white-fleshed fillet of fish with parsley sprinkled over it, the other in Boise, driving a cab in the night, windows down, leaning out lazily to smoke a handrolled cigarette, watching figures move coupled under lampposts, making their way home, or to some other bar, how he keeps driving the same loop until a stranger lifts his hand and hails him come.
It could go on days like this, weeks. Us burrowing inside the farmhouse as snow stacks around in slowly encroaching drifts. The skies white and gray, depending on what they were carrying. White doesn’t mean snow. It always means it will pass. We would have the small moments in the early morning when the light is shy from the window, where it tests the wall before falling into bed. You would say, “I have always wanted a thing with someone to be exactly this.”
I would say, “I know.”
But I can tell you, if you do not know, that the winter would weigh on you, your smooth legs longing for the sun. The desire for it would settle about your knees. Your knees are always cold. They do not have the sand of the white beach to exfoliate the malaise, the time passing, they do not have the water to lap away the tendons’ tension at the hollows there. You would go back, and I’ll tell you this: it would be no great thing.
•
You say I could come down there, the Sierra Nevadas, over the phone to me here, now, you say you can see it. Us at a low-lit bar in the city where you tease older men and I sit in a corner booth, my black hat on, the one we got in Rome, I’ll sit with my notebook scrawling half-called revelations onto it. You would come over in your purple dress and black tights with the pattern of roses on them. Kiss me on the lips. It would be sweet and raise no eyebrows. Women are together often now, even here; even us. A song would come on and in the section of the bar where people dance, you would pull me out and we would turn, one hand on the others’ hip, the other clasped in the air, as we pivot and twirl slowly to folk sound. I would wear the sapphire earrings that match my dress. The ones to catch any light and bring it to my eyes. This floor was laid for us. Later I’ll talk to some students by the windows. They are art students, no doubt, as we are artists. You will talk to a man at the bar and he will lean over, as they always do, brush a strand of hair from your face, slide a slip of paper to you with ten digits on it. I will pretend not to see. You know I see. I will say nothing but on the way back to your apartment, along the dusty sidewalks, you will say it has nothing to do with what we have. We like each other when there’s no man to like, but there are often men. I will say, “I know, but while I am here.” The way I say it the word is some letter, some variable, that is supposed to make things different. No longer equal to y. When we get back to your studio on the second floor I will sit on your bed with a book and look out the window. You will sit beside me and run your fingers across my knuckles, across lips textured as petals. All will be forgiven before it is called upon again. But that night you will go out with him. I will wonder why I didn’t get the art student’s number. Because I didn’t want it.
No matter what way I cut it, it doesn’t end happy, we don’t know how to make it like that.
But at least there would have been the times.
•
As it is, I sit parked on a gravel road thinking about going in to see the man I see here, and sit on his couch as he finds no resistance to be called such. The lights of a movie playing on the wall. The movie will be forgotten. It’s already immaterial. He has called me and said he is in, done with his work on the railroad for the day. The moon is full and so I have decided to sit under it for a bit and look up at its face. My car off, the window cranked so I can blow the cigarette smoke outside. I like to smoke but I don’t like to smell of smoke. You don’t smoke like I do. An old Loretta Lynn song is on the radio, the twang of strings under the crackle of the way records were made back then. Have we danced to this song, or have I only imagined us dancing to it? Have you imagined us dancing to it? I don’t know. I thought maybe you would call during this time, a sense of me under the moon, but you don’t.
•••
Caitlin Palmer is a writer from the Midwest who writes about wanderlust, malaise, and decay. Transplanted to the West to receive her MFA at the University of Idaho, she has been the fiction editor there for Fugue, and the program’s Hemingway Fellow. She recently received a mentorship at the Tin House Writers Workshop. You can find more of her work at DIAGRAM, Hobart, Gravel, and Ghost Proposal.