Either way, I have never sat so still in my life. And I have never felt so entirely awake.
It was the summer of the broken air conditioner, the summer the magnolia trees dropped their petals like crumpled love letters onto the driveway, and the summer I learned that a sleeping person is a locked room. -ENG- Sleeping Cousin -RJ353254-
So I stayed silent. I stayed still. And when the power flickered back on an hour later—the hum of the refrigerator, the distant click of a lamp—she drew her hand back slowly, turned onto her side, and kept sleeping. Either way, I have never sat so still in my life
I should have left. I knew that. The rational part of my brain—the part that sounded like my mother, like every etiquette book, like the unspoken law of cousins and family gatherings—was screaming at me to turn around, to go sweat it out in my tiny room. So I stayed silent
Not waking—just a small, mammalian turn. Her hand slipped from her stomach and fell over the edge of the chaise. Her fingers brushed my knee.
Her fingers were warm. Light as a fallen petal. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t open her eyes. In that half-dream state, perhaps she thought the chaise was wider, or that the warmth beside her was just the memory of a body.