I entered the phase of my life when I began to date men with guns. The move to Montana helped accelerate the onset of this stage. This felt new and exciting, like it had things to teach me. These men—mostly hunters, but also the occasional personal security guard or a private contractor for the army—seemed sturdy, masculine, steeped in knowledge that to me was occult. Aren’t sex and death intimately connected? Wasn’t a tender primal truth present here? If only I could grasp the link. I was curious. I imagined their muscular fingers would tear ribcages apart, imagined them sink into the still-warm flesh of elk, red and wet with blood. Images that were distinctly erotic. Just think what those fingers could do to a woman. But could they?

This phase of my life could alternatively be titled: my mid-twenties. I was searching for something for which I had no name. Exile played a big part in this. What part exactly was difficult to say. I wasn’t from here. I wasn’t from anywhere near Montana. Most days I felt tugged right and left in bouts of improvised performances upon a blacked-out stage before no audience. My parents had just died. I think I was trying very hard to become something new, or possibly get back to what I once had been. These men felt like archways to step through.

The first man took me to a speakeasy-style bar inside a building’s basement: floorboards creaked overhead, a musician strummed a guitar flat on his lap. The place seemed sincere and strange. It was exactly the kind of exotic experience I moved here half-hoping to find. The man in question was tall, sveltely muscular, with a blondish-reddish beard. He stood up when he saw me. A hunter, if I ever saw one, and I never had.

He’d only ever been to one country in Europe—not mine—and the fact that most of the population did not possess guns unnerved him. He said it made him feel unsafe. I said I felt that way about here. He offered to take me shooting one day. I said: okay. I had no idea what “shooting” entailed. Would a carcass be involved, a bulletproof vest, face paint? I moved to Montana for grad school. I was a painter. I could have gone to Yale or NYU or Bard but I came here. Why here? I had no answer for him. Jasper, his name was. He worked for the government as a road engineer. Hunting came purely from the heart—everything he knew he taught himself. I understood passion, I understood self-taught. His articulated fingers carved quick gestures as he explained the rivers in which salmon ran and the migratory patterns of pronghorn elk.

Jasper asked to hear my mother tongue, then smiled as if seeing me for the first time. I asked him to tell me something I did not know.

“Do you know the difference between how a mountain lion and a grizzly take apart its prey?”

I shook my head.

“The mountain lion will pluck out the fur, bit by bit; the bear will use its claw to slowly peel the skin.” Jasper glowed with a fleeting copper haze of passion.

I felt at ease. None of this talk seemed eerie or out of place. His eyes, god, his eyes did not leave mine. They shimmered in that low light, colorless.

All night I heard my body decide: yes.

The next time I saw Jasper, he picked me up in his blue truck. When he got out my stomach did a complicated tug, a simultaneous backward and sideways spin, like a planet revolving in space. Damn, he was beautiful. The intervening week had dulled this effect and now here it was, in full force. I did not let this on. We drove east of town, following the hum of rivers, between steep red canyon cliffs and faraway trees turning copper. Birch trees, I wanted to say, but that would be wrong. It was early October, the air was cool and full of woodsmoke. He pointed to the river and said, “Later in the fall I trap beaver here.” I waited for the follow-up of laughter, but it was not a joke.

People back home gave me deep, grave looks when I said I was moving to Montana. Almost always they cited cowboys, guns, rodeos, cartoonish images of saloons, canyons, desolate stretches of mountain, and, quite wrongly, mesas—before abruptly running out of associations. Since moving here I’d only seen one man in cowboy boots, and it was at Walmart. I did not tell them this, not wanting to spur them on. Why, they wanted to know, as though my choice were an affront to the old world they believed we were bound to. What will you do out there? They wondered, or alternatively wished me well, with the sincerity and seriousness appropriate to one they might never see again. I listened to these anxieties with forced patience. I listened as an anthropologist might listen to the valley tribe’s stories of the mountain tribe, knowing the valley tribe has never been up the mountain. But then I landed at the local airport and saw the walls of mounted carcasses and creatively posed taxidermy, men with chest-long beards, women in camo socks, and thought to myself: you idiot.

For what felt like a long time, Jasper drove us down a dirt road. He kept glancing at his phone, an app that marked public and private land. The lines kept shifting between roam free and trespass.

“That’s another thing about America,” I said to him, “you can’t go where you want to go.”

He looked at me, then frowned like someone receiving bad news. At last we pulled over. Behind us a steep reddish cliff, in front of us a long field, somewhere water flowed. A few camper vans went by, prayer flags in the windows.

“Dirtbags,” Jasper said.

He opened the trunk and pulled out a colorful bull’s-eye, a case of empty beer bottles, and three serious-looking black suitcases I realized were guns.

“Shotgun, air rifle, hand pistol,” Jasper said, setting them carefully one by one on the ground.

I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant. We carried everything into the field. I watched him set up targets, walk there and back while he counted steps—measuring what, don’t ask me. Jasper asked for the three rules I was supposed to memorize: treat all guns as if they’re loaded, always point the muzzle to the ground, and keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.

“Good, good,” he nodded, and handed me a bullet that weighed nothing.

“You have any questions?” he asked, the look in his eyes boyish and bright.

“Yes,” I said. “What’s a muzzle?”

He smiled, shook his head, and laughed.

“That’s the muzzle.” Jasper pointed to the end of the gun, then placed giant headphones over my head.

It did cross my mind, at least once, that shooting guns with a man I just met might not be my finest choice. Although, it did seem exactly the kind of behavior Montana required. I had a good feeling, is all I can say. Jasper seemed straightforward and simple, a lake so clear you can see each detail of its depth. When I gave my roommate all the pertinent information she raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Be safe.” I thought that was reasonable advice and left.

As I watched this handsome man lie on his stomach in the tumbleweed grass, and lift a rifle to his left eye and shoot a clean bull’s-eye, I couldn’t help but smile. This was as Montana as it could get. This was the West. I imagined my thumb between Jasper’s teeth, his forearm round my waist in the back of the truck, guns scattered across the backseat as a distant prop, a counterweight. What was the source of this attraction? I didn’t care for excessive killing. I used to be vegetarian. I couldn’t understand, which did nothing to lessen its hold. There was something about men with guns.

But when it was my turn to shoot, Jasper’s arms did not wrap around mine, his hands remained at his sides, trusting I’d be competent enough to follow his example, and I was. I was surprised to feel the gut drop of genuine disappointment at his lack of guidance. I shot. I hit the blue ring on the bull’s-eye, then the red. I shot three glass bottles that exploded gleefully into the air. It was so easy. Bullets were light as air. It was not terrifying, as I expected. It was not terrifying at all, I would report to my friends back home, it was fun.

That’s the problem, I thought. Luckily, it wasn’t my problem.

After we finished shooting, Jasper asked me to help collect the broken glass and I thought: environmentally conscious. Not that it mattered to me, not at all. Darkness started to dim the sky. By the time we drove up the dirt road, his two headlights were the only discs of light. Jasper asked if I would want to go shooting again, maybe do a hike. I asked what a typical hunt looked like. He said it involved focus, a lot of patience, then told me about a hunting trip he did in northern Minnesota. The way he talked made me calm. He reminded me of autumns at home, chestnuts, and red leaves of oak. He reminded me of who I once was, of The Tallest Man on Earth songs, of longing for things I had no knowledge of—remote cabins, artistic renown, multiple lovers.

In the passenger seat, I felt full of chill and outdoors, as though I’d accumulated the day’s luster and could glow. Jasper asked what my parents are like. We were back on the highway. Names of places rose and flattened on the road signs, sounding tense and vaguely folkloric: Kalispell, Great Falls, Polson. I misread the last one as Poison. I didn’t know what to tell him.

“They’re fine,” I said, and for a while we did not speak.

Then, driving over the river that ran through town, Jasper said, “I think I’d like to have a daughter one day and name her June.”

I said nothing.

So, there are people like that, I contemplated afterward, people whose desires followed a straightforward track, as an arrow being shot, uncomplicated and aimed at a single place to land. Desires with no commas, no question marks. Jasper did not have to tell me he was looking for a wife. He did not have to tell me his parents were happily married. His worst pain, he did tell me, arrived after losing Winnie, his childhood black lab. I wondered if the two of us could be happy together. I wondered if it was possible for someone who has not yet suffered to understand one who has. Jasper was content in this small Montana town. Jasper did not long for elsewhere, or perhaps that was to be my role: supply his life with an uncanny flicker, be somewhere he could never truly know.

When he suggested a hike for our third date, I said yes.

At the trailhead, Jasper pulled out a heavy-looking backpack and explained he needed to train for hunting season.

“After field dressing a deer I hike it out in my backpack,” Jasper said, “an average carcass weighs about a hundred pounds.”

That number meant nothing to me.

I glanced at the fine blond hairs on his knuckles. I imagined them pulling out plush sacs of guts, breaking ribs apart, proficient, and matter-of-fact. I felt the base of my stomach snap to attention. Red-tailed hawks circled overhead.

“Man, I love that sound,” he said.

“I can hear trains whistle from the lecture rooms,” I told him.

“Oh,” Jasper laughed, “is that your emblem of the West?”

I was surprised at his use of ‘emblem.’

He told me he read The Gulag Archipelago twice, which surprised me even more.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s important to know what happened over there, what humans are capable of,” he said. Then after a while, “Well, you’d know.”

“I’m not Russian,” I replied and he laughed like it was such a funny joke.

I was not Russian. Where I was from was irrelevant. I was not from here, that is all.

Midway up the mountain Jasper and I sat on the base of a giant white letter. Giant white letter? Correct. A Montanan custom, or perhaps a local fetish, who knows, to decorate mountainsides with the first letter of the town below. It was the kind of thing my friends back home found amusing or registered with some degree of pity, like, “Oh, that’s what Americans are up to.”

In those conversations with Europe I found myself torn between laughing along and defending a place I was—at least spatially, at least geographically—now a part of. I had a predilection for its dirt-road charms. I knew dirt roads. I knew countryside. I knew riding boots and broken bones.

The shape of the letter was L. We sat at the base of it. Jasper offered me a neon-blue sports drink, the sugar made me wince. There was a lick of light in his eyes. He wanted to kiss me, I could tell, but there was not enough cue to go on. I wanted to watch him flail, see what he would do. Here’s the thing, he did not flail. He did not force a sexual undertone as men are so often apt to lead with or panic their way into. We continued going uphill. At one point he said I walked like a fat person. I spun around and half-laughed, half-yelled something at him. Jasper gently placed both of his hands on my shoulders and smiled.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s true. Your feet, you stick them out sideways.”

The warmth of his hands on me, the tightrope way he teased me, it all charmed me very much.

I was adamant about not falling in love. That’s not what this was about. Love has nothing to do with exile.

Actually, love has everything to do with exile.

When I left home everything was devastatingly beautiful and I was devastated. The blueberries were going from violet to blue, apples were almost ripe, sun touched the ears of wheat and of deer equally. There was not a corner of the house that did not slant with familiar patterns of shadow and light. I knew every dirt road by heart. I knew the intervals at which the church bells tolled and by the ways the mournful men marched down the hill, whether it was a wedding or a funeral. I knew the gap between the birches where the moon rose. The river ran low, there hadn’t been rain in months. In the fields, poppies scattered their reds into crumbling tractor marks. Black beetles crawled over forest paths. In the ditch: blue chicory flowers, rosy bindweeds, yellow buttercups. It was too much to leave, and I left.

Without love there would be no exile. We would not long for what we lost.

At his apartment, Jasper gave me a tour, pointing out the beaver skulls, stuffed pheasants, the antlers, fossils, and the rocks. He lived alone. An American flag hung in the kitchen, below it were jars of pear preserves he had made himself. On his bookshelves I found Doctor Zhivago and, indeed, The Gulag Archipelago. I thought Jasper was a man who never told a single lie in his life. When I asked what his favorite part of hunting was he said, “It changes you forever.” On the couch his lips were delicate, fingertips slow and tremulous. Not what I expected from a hunter, yet the contradiction pleased me. Such dissonances were full of possibility.

I took Jasper’s bearded jaw between my forefinger and thumb. His hands moved down my sides, traced my stomach, to where the hip bones arced.

“Your breathing changed,” Jasper said.

“My what?”

“Your breath.”

“How can you tell?”

A grin devoured his face. “I can tell.”

I felt full of happiness and hope. If he could read my breath imagine what else this man could do. I stood up, pulled off my sweaty shirt, and led Jasper through what I correctly guessed was the bedroom door.

“God,” he said several minutes later, “I’m sorry, this doesn’t—”

We were both looking down.

“—usually happen.”

He pressed the base of his palm into his eye socket, half-suspended over me.

I said it was okay, not because it was okay, but because that’s what is expected of a woman in situations like this. I’m not a particularly nice woman, but sometimes I like to pretend to be.

We were silent for a while.

“You’re just so—ah.” He pressed a closed fist to his forehead, then moved it over his lips. “You’re just so.”

I rolled my eyes, pulled his face between my legs, and thought—this won’t work.

      

One day I drove through the vast fields at the edge of town, past trespassing after trespassing sign. I could get shot, I thought, and kept driving. I played a song. What song is difficult to say—some song. Some song that made me very, very happy. It’s possible it was not a song, but a classical composition. It’s possible it was Chopin. Only Chopin could make me burst into long, ugly tears. I drove. My wet eyes blurred roads to rivers. A deer jumped in front of the car and I did not stop. Did I mean to hit it? I wasn’t sure, but somehow, in the correct symmetry of crisscrossing speed, the car and the deer managed to miss each other. I stopped then. I stopped and got out of the car and knelt in the rising dust. I pressed my forehead into the loose gravel, and cried. I cried until I remembered my name, then I stood and drove to the house, where my roommate glanced at me and said, “Some guy called.”

I hadn’t realized I left my phone.

In my land, back home, I never liked the Virgin Mary shrines. Webbed with ribbons in the usual alternating pattern of red, blue, green, yellow, white, they stood on nearly every other corner. I didn’t like Mary’s blue dress or the infant she was always holding, all those contradictory statements on reproduction and sexuality so quietly therein contained. I never liked seeing them at the edges of villages or the older women, kneeling with scarves folded into triangles on the backs of their heads, lips moving in the rhythmic motions of prayer, but now, driving back and forth across this town, beside the McDonald’s, the Starbucks, the Wendy’s, the sight of a single shrine would have changed everything.

      

The second man I met was in one of my mandatory elective classes, in English Lit. He was studying sustainable construction but in fact wanted to be a writer, and behind that, what he truly and secretly wanted was to be a leader against climate change. I laughed when he told me.

“You want to be Greta Thunberg?”

He shook his head, smiling, like: shut the fuck up. Then he looked at me hopelessly. The whole thing seemed a little hazy. He was a few years younger than me, too young, maybe, to predict the mute remorse of lost years. But I also knew occasionally it was necessary to move in the opposite direction of what you desire in order to get to it. It did not fail to occur to me that might be what I was doing.

His name was Charlie. He was from a small Colorado town, had brackish water eyes and long hair he sometimes braided. And he owned a gun. That was essential. When I asked why, he looked at me like the question was beside the point.

“I used to hunt with my dad,” Charlie eventually replied, “and it’s good to have.”

I nodded.

“I also have one gun in storage that’s not mine.”

“Oh,” I said. “Whose is it?”

“My roommate’s.”

I gave a soft hum, as if that made sense of everything.

In Charlie, I found a more equal match. For hours we moved through one another. I wanted him down the length of me. When I saw him naked for the first time I almost sighed. I’d never seen a more beautiful outline drape midair. Charlie seemed indifferent to his own body, which only made my passions for it more heated. I could claim it as my own without having an owner to negotiate, and I did, or at least I did my best. Occasionally in bed one of us would pause, smile, and shake our heads, because it really felt too good for this Earth. “You’re this perfect sex creature,” I once told him. He laughed and replied, “Look who’s talking.”

Charlie wanted to see my paintings, not the pictures I had on my phone, but stop by the studio and see the big canvases in person. He stared at them for a long time, then said he wasn’t sure what they were about but one, that one, moved him very much. It was a painting of two thick white lines intersecting across a chaos of grayish black: everything textured, everything pained.

“They’re not supposed to be understood,” I told him, as though the mere suggestion of understanding abstraction was childish and passé, but of course, they were. Meant to be understood. Or rather, I understood them. I was saying something specific through them. Of course, I did not expect my audience to be receptive to undertones of exilic emotion, but nonetheless, I hoped Charlie would understand.

For the following week he texted me interpretations of the painting. Nazism and Europe, he wrote and I laughed. The principle of seriousness and jest. Past and present. All of them wrong, except the final one, meant as a joke: you and me. That could be correct, I typed, then deleted everything and replied with a laughing emoji instead. In the face of being found out I have learned to be trite.

All was going well. Charlie sustained the correct ratio of sex to guns. I didn’t know how many guns were part of the equation, but I knew the equation was right. His dramatic jaw bone fit perfectly inside the palm of my hand. His hazel eyes were unlike the eyes of anyone back home, and that, in itself, was another triumph. I left long scratch marks down his back that he adored. We didn’t do much besides have sex and go to questionably lit bars at late hours of the night. In his truck, giant and gray, he once asked what I listened to. I plugged in my phone and played Biggie Smalls to make him laugh. Charlie widened his eyes. “Seriously?” I laughed and said, “Yeah, sometimes.” I saw it lock in slow-motion behind his gaze: the fact that he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did.

There were nights, lots of them, when his erection flickered on and off. It might seem like this was a sudden development, but it existed from the start, this interruption in momentum. What is it with American men, I asked myself. Is this a national problem? Does everyone know? During one of these forced intermissions, I ordered Charlie to describe field dressing for me.

“In detail,” I said.

He looked at me like it was an insane request, given the context.

“Ah, I don’t know. It takes a lot of time—” he paused. “You’re mainly just quartering out the animal. It’s a lot of rough cuts around joints. You’re also skinning the animal, so you want to cut in the direction of the hair. Before any of this you should gut the animal so none of the intestines spoil the meat. It’s an involved process to cut the pelvic bone—”

I shuddered, noticing he was describing the process backwards.

“—avoid breaching the bladder and spilling urine on the meat. You also want to avoid touching the metatarsal glands with the knife, that can give a bitter taste to the meat. Once the animal is gutted, best practice in grizzly country is to drag them one hundred yards downwind.”

A man, I comforted myself, unafraid to get his hands dirty.

“Satisfied?” He pinned my arms into the mattress.

I smiled. “No,” I said.

Charlie ran his lips over my left nipple.

Weeks passed. It became winter and the deer carcasses started showing up.

They always revealed themselves in a double take, half-shrouded by tarps, riding in the backs of trucks or casually parked in front of a grocery store, the edge of an antler sticking out.

I could be indifferent to it. No, I could not.

I thought of Jasper’s body pressed into the snow, serious-eyed, forefinger flipping the safety guard. I thought of the ruffled soil of fresh graves, the way rain slides down a double headstone. The relief of such silence. I saw myself as a young girl. A small mysterious figure, opaque, compact, with blond looping curls. I thought of the woman who sold balloons in front of the park. I saw the balloons. Chestnuts in tall blossom. Clouds sailing over faraway church spires like battleships. When the woman lifted a hand to bring down a blue balloon, I flinched. Who could have hurt you? I wished I could ask her; though, of course, I knew.

Only once did I summon the courage to walk up to such a carcass, strapped to the back of a parked truck, and peer underneath the covering tarp. I saw a mess of reddened fur, a tongue sticking out, the head twisted in a pose suggestive of agony.

Was this the initiation I had hoped for? Evidently not.

Charlie and I continued. In class our gazes brushed with pleasurable and pretend indifference. I loved knowing how every square inch of him looked naked. Seeing his lean torso slouch in the classroom chair made me want to walk over there and slide onto his hips. An incremental increase of pleasure until the final bright exclaim: one hundred eyes opening at once. It became necessary to restrain my carnal impulses.

Gaps began to show themselves within our more intense moments.

Charlie was desperate to cook for me. It was obvious this held some heightened significance for him; perhaps it was a hallmark of ritual courtship, the kind of thing good men were supposed to do. The offer, evidently meant to please me, evoked instinctive resistance, hostility even. I postponed it for as long as I decently could, thinking up the strangest excuses, including, “I need my paints to dry.” God knows what that meant. Charlie knew nothing about painting, and, it was becoming gradually and painfully clear, he knew very little about me.

I could have told him anything—where I was from we have no internet, we communicate through fax, we ride reindeer to work. He might have believed it.

I explained the lack of interest as a result of impoverished knowledge, lack of imagination—one of the two, or possibly both. Probably both. Charlie wouldn’t know how to begin, what to ask about. He couldn’t approach me through the most distant metaphor. And is that not what I wanted?

Only very rarely did a wind pick up the familiar scent of forest—pine, moss, dew—and almost bring me to my knees. The pain was too visceral, a hard kick under the skin.

Nothing else in Montana reminded me of home. Not the gentle slouch of hills that people called mountains, not the pawn gun shops, not the police tape cordoning off entire blocks when another kid brought a gun to school. Not the drive-through ATMs or the low steep of smog. Not the bison, not the railway yard or the absence of blue eyes.

Eventually I agreed to dinner. When I arrived, after a late evening lecture, darkness seeming eternal, Charlie greeted me with two glasses of wine. “Here,” he said, then announced, rather gleefully, we’d be having elk lasagna.

“Did you hunt the elk yourself?”

He nodded. “Last season, so it’s frozen.”

Charlie asked me to set out plates, slice carrots, grate the cheese. I felt unexpectedly summoned from the audience to fill a part onstage. I felt ill-prepared, required to perform—I wasn’t sure what.

Charlie hummed jovially as he spiced elk meat. I’d never heard him hum before. He turned around to glance at me, and I quickly pulled on a smile. None of this was very like me. We made garlic bread, which seemed a strange addition to the meal. We ate. The food tasted like salty nothing, but otherwise everything was fine. I shouldn’t have made a big deal of this dinner. This is what women want, I told myself—want this.

Charlie stood and scooped what was left on his plate into the trash. I’d never seen anyone throw out that much food. He told me that cooking was something he was trying to get better at, that he used to do it quite frequently, but then just kind of stopped. A silent beat followed. “Cooking together is a great way to find out someone’s character,” Charlie added.

That last statement, apart from being ridiculously and obviously incorrect, confirmed a latent suspicion. This had all been a test.

There’s a perfect word in my mother tongue for what I felt in that moment, but no translation exists and I don’t think I could explain.

I tried to steady myself, but the damage had been done.

Another night I asked him, “Do you ever think about the fact that I’m not from here?”

We were sitting in his gray truck, waiting for a break in the rain to run inside a bar. Charlie thought about it with a serious look on his face that made him all the more beautiful, then said, “Beyond your accent, no. Not really.”

We were silent for a while.

“You?” he eventually asked. “Do you think about me being American?”

I must have smiled, raised my eyebrows.

“I don’t have to think about it. It’s just always there.”

He gave that some thought.

“Well, I don’t consider myself to be, you know, a typical American.”

I laughed. He was serious.

A variation of this story has already been told. It’s been told as a painting and therefore, is not this story at all. The image is by René Magritte, it’s called The Lovers. Two faces, a woman and a man, as indicated by the clothing, are kissing. Both faces are wrapped with white cloth. All the obvious themes of longing, isolation, suffocation, and blindness apply. We’re strangers to each other, et cetera, et cetera. Desire and death, one could make those words rhyme.

I won’t.

Winter wore on. The number of dead bodies increased, then abruptly ceased. It occurred to me that for every deer carcass in town there was a man with a gun. A man with a pulse, with crisscrossed veins on his wrists, a particular cadence of voice, and a particular pattern of hair down the abdomen.

“Can I do anything I want to you?” I asked Charlie.

He nodded.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Anything you want,” he confirmed.

A few weeks before Christmas, Jasper texted me. He said he didn’t know if I was going home for the holidays. If not, I was invited to celebrate with him and his family. I interpreted that to mean he wanted a second chance. Around that time, Charlie asked me to be his girlfriend.

“I’m not the girlfriend type,” I told him gently.

Charlie appeared irritated. And I couldn’t believe he so misunderstood the nature of what I was.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he snapped.

“What I want?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “I don’t want anything from you.”

He flew to Colorado for a few days to visit family. I stayed in Montana.

It approached, the dreaded time of Christmas. Occasionally I saw the L on the mountainside and smiled; otherwise I was miserable. Only those born into happy families enjoy Christmas. My roommate flew home. Then it was just me.

In the house, silence sharpened its even teeth.

I drove over to Jasper’s place one night, knocked on the door, expecting him to be out. I shuffled from foot to foot, the snow was half a meter tall. I had started to turn around when I heard the door unlock.

“Hey?”

The question was inflected with such joy I knew at once what I would do.

“Hey,” I said and walked inside. I did not take off my jacket or my boots. I put one hand against his chest and pushed him back across the kitchen, across the living room, then with a flick of a wrist backwards onto the bed. Of course, he let me do all this.

“Well fuck,” Jasper said. “Okay.”

His beard a rasp against my chin. His hands pulled off my jacket, my sweater, my jeans. I felt like sparks were catching off me, a circuit full of faults.

Jasper ran his tongue flat up my thigh. I flipped us around and pinned his face to the bed with my hips. There is no way to explain the look in his eyes, the delighted slow upward roll to meet mine. “Now fuck me,” I said, and he did.

Everything went as I originally hoped it would.

Afterward, panting, Jasper looked at me with a face of optimism and hope, like a man about to hear the verdict knowing he’ll be proclaimed not guilty. I thought: oh no.

“Look,” I started to say, searching for the correct name to give things.

“Listen, you don’t have to,” Jasper cut me off. “I know it’s Christmas.”

I paused because it was such a strange and accurate thing to say.

Then he stood up and kissed my temple, a gesture that pierced me with its sudden sincerity. I got dressed. Jasper handed me my two limp white socks and walked me to the entrance. The door hadn’t fully shut earlier and a few snowflakes had drifted in. He stood there naked, and said, “The Christmas Eve invitation stands.”

I thought: stop being nice to me.

I drove back. One after another, the streetlights turned green. I sped past the Starbucks, the McDonald’s, the Wendy’s. I was almost at the house, taking the second to last turn when I saw a misshapen pale heap, slumped and disfigured. A shape of death. A carcass? A corpse? My heart flattened. My ribs wrapped around a gasp.

I slammed the brakes.

I couldn’t tell whether it was a deer or a human. Warm skin tones glared against the snow. I was preparing myself to see something hideous, jaw clenched, when the image shifted into focus: it was a chair. Tilted against it were a few planks of wood. On top of the chair stood a cardboard box with one flap lifted so it did not seem like a cardboard box. Hanging off the back was a billowy white mass, a fitted sheet. Underneath a small sign read: FREE STUFF.

Dizzy, I slouched in the car seat. I took a few breaths, turned on the engine, and turned the car around. I couldn’t go home. Grief pressed down, a long dark tide poured itself through me. I became a sieve incapable of separating all its black grains. No, no. Please, let this stop.

I drove back across town, texting: Where are you?

Home. Got in this morning.

Haphazard in my desire, I knocked on his door.

“Let’s do it differently this time,” I said when Charlie appeared in the doorframe.

His body was receptive to this change of direction. I moved us through new coordinates, layering sensation over sensation, closing my eyes and forgetting my name, letting everything blur. If only I could live there, never exit the antidote. The pitch of him in me expanded, a stone tossed into a body of water, concentric circles, until the entire surface rippled and I let out a hard scream. Then his penis went limp.

It was only briefly, face between my thighs, that I worried he might taste another man on me. I had no idea what I’d say if confronted. But Charlie only gave his usual preliminary exhale and said, “I missed you so much.” I grabbed a fistful of his hair. He seemed perfectly unaware.

This felt like a dangerous absolution. Not for me, dangerous for men. A woman can do anything.

I had forgotten all about the strange skin-colored shape, all about the billowing sheet, and more importantly, I had forgotten what these shapes evoked: shrouds, loss, a thousand dark grains demanding to be felt and sorted. I had hoped moving half an earth away, killing all associations, would exempt me of all this. If not for the chair maybe it would have.

I took Charlie’s Adam’s apple into my lips and we lay there, skin indistinguishable from skin, heat from heat. He moaned.

I remembered something I wanted to ask him. “Why do you have your roommate’s gun?”

“Oh.” Charlie propped himself up on an elbow and looked at me. “He, ah, he told me to take it because he wanted to kill himself.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, he asked me to lock it away from him.”

His roommate worked night shifts at a shabby casino near the airport. I never met him.

Guns. We do not choose our symbols; we inherit them.

“Shower with me?” Charlie asked.

I could have gone anywhere but I came here, to Montana. All my life I believed I’d be happy once my parents died. They’ve been dead for a few months. A car crash, five hundred meters away from our house. A gun was found in the glovebox after. What was the gun for? Good question.

In the bathroom I watched Charlie step into the shower. I watched the beautiful dimples on his ass, the hazel path of hair between the two indents of his lower hips, and had to ask myself: is this what happiness is?