by Lindsay McDonald

You let your ex spend the night, and you aren’t really sleeping. Instead you are pretending to sleep—the blanket way up over your head when he pushes his palm into the meaty part of your thigh, kneading your skin over and over with increasing pressure—until you can’t ignore him. You want to leave the blanket up over your head, in hopes that he’ll retreat as he has done so many times before, in hopes that he’ll go out the door into the snow that has crusted over into ice, into the frozen expanse beyond your trailer.

When you lift your head, you see him, but he’s only half there, mostly cloaked in shadow while his hair seems to glow, backlit by the light seeping in from the hallway. You find yourself wanting to reach out to him, but instead you reach for the lamp. He is then revealed to be just a boy with hair that is matted and greasy, as if he’s been running his hands through it all night. He rocks back and forth, tapping his left knee in a quick rhythm—tap, tap, tap—and you find that you love him in an uneasy way, a way that makes you want to go back to sleep.

He pleads for you to come and see the lights, and you say no because you’re tired and you’ve seen them before. These antics were once interesting, but now you only want to sleep. You stare at each other, the silence stretching across the space between you. Then he says, “Please, please, please,” with so much fervor that you find yourself climbing out of the bed despite yourself.

You dress slowly, hoping he might change his mind, wander off and forget the whole thing. But he waits patiently at the door, still tap, tap, tapping, with his foot on the floor. You follow him through the kitchen, where he’s been up while you slept, where cigarette butts spill over the edges of the ashtray and stray flecks of ash litter the table. There are also flecks of white which are not ash at all, and a tightly rolled five-dollar bill sits on the edge of the table. When you reach the foyer, you step into your boots and pull on your parka, steel yourself for the rush of cold that will force its way through the open door. He slips into his shoes, and you both step out into the blue-black night.

The air is icy and bites at your exposed skin, and your eyelashes are frosting over, a look reminiscent of tree limbs covered by hoarfrost. You look up through the frost of your lashes, follow his pointing finger. You don’t see any lights, only a blank and black sky, punctuated by the pinpricks of stars that are so far away that no one could get to, not in a thousand lifetimes. Stars that are already dead, their glow extinguished elsewhere yet still visible here.

You tell him you don’t see anything, that it’s too cold for this sort of thing, and ask isn’t he freezing in only a t-shirt. He simply asks you to wait, and then you see the soft ribbons of green light as they begin to crawl across the sky, to unfurl and undulate. You’ve seen better and you tell him this, and his response is to put his arm around your shoulder and say you took too long. He seems serene, in a way that you remember him being a long time ago, when you were just starting out. You can allow yourself to mistake this look, this focus, for real change, but only for a moment, before you cut it short and walk back to the trailer, back to your bed, with its soft mattress and warm sheets.

As you turn away, you don’t know if he is disappointed or not, perhaps he hasn’t even noticed. But you like to imagine him—standing behind you, hands shoved in his pockets and his head low, staring down at the snow, a forlorn look on his face. In this way, you can punish him for not being good enough, for making you give in, over and over.