The Bug-out by Sarah Harshbarger
Managing editor Audrey Bauman on today’s bonus story: I fell in love with Laura and Hallie by the end of the first paragraph. Laura’s feelings toward Hallie are tender and yearning; their lives are richly detailed with absurd liberal parents, apocalypse forums, and the experience of loving someone who is by your side but fixated on an uncertain future, a distant event on the horizon. Sarah Harshbarger explores their anxieties and desires in a heartfelt queer romance, conveying both hope and melancholy as two girls navigate “making time now to make time for later.”
The Bug-out
When she first asked me what my plans were for the apocalypse, we had been dating about three weeks. We had already made it through almost two seasons of Catfish, sharing an iPhone and a set of earbuds in a nook by the freshman lockers. We had painted each other’s nails black, and afterward I had been careful not to scrub any dishes at home, clinging to our first exchange of commitment. We had even made out some, debunking Kelly Fitzpatrick’s claim that two girls couldn’t do it with tongue, because their mouths would both be too small, “like a doll’s.”
Some mornings I’d get so worked up imagining us doing things together, I’d throw up before school. One time I did this after fantasizing that we’d skip fifth period study hall and walk together, hand-in-hand, to the Subway on Ten Oaks Road. So I wanted to say the right thing about the apocalypse. Something witty, I thought. Make her laugh that one way, through her nose. But I fumbled it. “I’d hide out at the Blockbuster,” I said. Blockbuster jokes were old, years too old. Hallie just kept looking at me expectantly, like I hadn’t answered yet.
“Come to my place after school,” she finally said. “My parents are going to a craps party.”
“What’s a craps party?” I asked.
“It’s a party where you play craps, and it takes, like, four hours,” she said. “If you get there by seven we should be okay.”
So I went upstairs to math and the whole time I was thinking of the apocalypse, my real plan for the apocalypse. I’d have to go somewhere, of course. I lived in the suburbs and that was no good. I had an uncle I could find in western Pennsylvania. But that sort of ran against the general narrative of my fantasy, that I’d try my best to keep my family together but that they’d die all at once in a sad-but-not-gross way and that after a suitable period of mourning, Hallie would show up and we’d forge our path to some forgotten cottage by some freshwater lake.
I drew a little lake at the top of my calculus packet with some cattails and ferns. I got stuck at this point because she hadn’t told me whether it was the zombie apocalypse or the climate change, whole-earth-dying apocalypse. I’d have to find out later, later that night. She had told me by seven at the latest, but what time at the earliest? My mom got off work at five and arrived home by five-thirty most nights unless she stopped at the grocery store. If she stopped at the grocery store she’d definitely want to make dinner. But if she didn’t, was it rude not to eat before a by-seven event? I could feel my stomach churning. I took a sip of water and put the details aside, and instead I let that feeling she gave me wash over me, that warm energy like a yellow ball of light sitting behind my heart.
***
I carried six bags of groceries on each thin arm, determined to haul in the whole load in one go. There were lots of green, leafy vegetables in plastic sleeves which didn’t bode well for a quick dinner before Hallie’s. My mother didn’t buy fresh produce unless she knew exactly what she was going to do with it.
I set the bags down on the table, and sure enough, she grabbed for the kale, the lemons, the heavy whipping cream. “I have to go to a friend’s tonight,” I warned her. “For a project.”
“Oh, what kind of project?” she asked. She rolled her sleeves up, undeterred, and splashed the cream into a saucepan on the stove.
“We’re making a plan for the apocalypse? It’s for social studies.”
“My generation didn’t get to do cool projects like that,” she said. “Then again, the next generation won’t either if they keep cutting funding from the humanities…”
I got up and took down plates and silverware to set the table while she worked, eyeing the clock. I filled three glasses with water, set the butter out to warm, and texted my dad, Mom says dinner in five, which meant he’d come in from the garden in fifteen.
“Laura, will you light Joe?” she asked.
I sighed and dug a lighter out from the junk drawer. It was a candle she’d gotten in a Christmas exchange, a round tin with Joe Biden’s face on it that was supposed to smell like orange Powerade. It had facts about him on the side, like that “he was elected to the Senate at age 29” and that “his middle name is Robinette, which will look great tattooed on your lower back!” The candle, of course, went perfectly with her Keep Calm and Hillary On tote bag and my dad’s Jon Stewart coffee mug.
There was no reason not to tell them. My mom would trade her Coexist bumper sticker for a rainbow one. My dad would write an awkward card about loving who you love and slip it under my bedroom door. I just couldn’t string the words together. I didn’t really want to.
When Hallie first asked me if my parents knew, I said I was waiting for the right time. “Well, don’t hold your breath,” she’d said. “If they don’t like it now, they never will. I can tell you that from experience.” I meant to correct her, to tell her that wasn’t the problem, but the moment passed, and days went by, and I never did. What if she didn’t understand? I imagined her telling me how many people would kill to be me, that just like Savenia didn’t deserve Dylan after she catfished him, I didn’t deserve my parents if I couldn’t be honest with them.
My dad came in and sat down beside me, and the smell of grass wafted over the candle’s chemical orange. He split open a dinner roll and spread butter on it, and I tried to picture him buttering a roll at my wedding to Hallie. I could picture him in a tux, sitting and buttering in an empty pew, but it didn’t look like any wedding I wanted. Our wedding would be small, quiet, miles away from any church. She would wear a suit, or I would—we would both wear suits. It would be evening, catered, strung up with lights—it would be all ours.
***
“Are you sure you don’t want me to hang around for a minute?” my mom asked. “Just to be sure it’s the right place?”
“It’s definitely the right place,” I said. “That’s her bike.”
She let me out at the end of the driveway and drove off, but when I knocked on the door, my heart pumping out of my sports bra, there was no answer. I looked around. There were some nicely trimmed bushes, a floral decorative flag. Then there was a set of stepping stones that led around the corner to a gate in the wooden fence.
I followed the path around the side of the house and creaked open the gate. I moved forward a step and there she was—bent over a small water garden tinkering with something under the fountain. Her striped t-shirt rode up over her hips, and I could see the elastic band of her underwear peeking out from her shorts. She didn’t look up until I called, “Hallie?”
She beamed and waved me over. I sat beside her in the grass, smoothed my skirt over my legs. She held up the thing she had been fiddling with, a blue tube with an opening like a water bottle. “It works,” she said. She bent over again and stuck the bottom in the fish pond, and she closed her eyes and sucked through it. She handed it to me, still dripping and with algae clinging to its side. “It’s a portable water filter,” she said. “By the time it gets to your mouth, it’s totally clean. Want to try it?”
I put the wide end back in the pond and hesitated, watching a white koi with wide pink lips blow lazy scum bubbles at me. I thought about pretending to drink, imagined how I’d swallow the air. But when I bent over the straw, and she put her hand on the small of my back, I found myself taking in a huge sip of hot—but clean—water.
“It works,” I said.
“I got it for fifteen bucks online,” she said. “Something like this can save your life.”
We pushed ourselves up, brushed grass from our red knees. She asked me if I wanted to check out her room, and I followed her inside. The bedroom was plain, with two wooden dressers, a desk where her tiny plastic laptop was plugged in. She had a wicker hamper with colored v-necks spilling out of it, and her bed was covered with a grey plaid comforter. On the bed sat a neon orange backpack, half-unzipped and bulging at the bottom.
“I’ve been working on this for a little while,” she said. “It’s called a bug-out bag.”
She unzipped it the rest of the way, and she pulled out a first aid kit, a swiss army knife, a roll of duct tape. A compass, a portable charger, a Women’s Daily multivitamin. A flashlight, pepper spray. “I have a list of things I want to pack, for if it happens,” she said. “My parents wouldn’t understand, so I just order everything online. I try to time it for when they won’t be home.”
I wondered if she wanted me to ask about her parents, but her focus was on the items scattered across the bedspread. I looked at them with her, picked up the flashlight, unfolded the knife. “You think it’s going to happen in our lifetime?” I asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” she said. “I just think it’s good practice to prepare for the worst. It’s like insurance—best case scenario it’s a total waste of money.”
“Yeah, I get it,” I said.
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” she said. “That’s how everybody thinks. I did too until I started doing my research. Like, why would I worry about the apocalypse when I have midterms right in front of me?” She sat down next to me. She kissed my cheek with one hand on my thigh, and she smiled, maybe at me, maybe at being able to share this with me. “Come here, check this out,” she said.
She turned on her computer, and already on the screen was a forum on a forest green background titled Emergency Preparedness Planning Advocates—EPPA. At the top of the page there was a grainy picture of a freckled man in a fresh white windbreaker. “Mr. Dunbar pulled this up in bio,” she said. “He was trying to say these people have the wrong idea and we need to wait for NASA to figure out how to terraform Mars. But when I went on it they actually make a lot of sense.”
She clicked on a post titled, kids will be too young if it happens next 6-8 years, how to protect? There were 18 replies. She scrolled past the ones that were mean-spirited, like eh, make new ones and the hardcore environmentalist ones about how terribly selfish it is to have kids. There were two near the bottom that Hallie had voted were “helpful.” One said, I take mine to youth CrossFit. If they can carry even ten pounds base weight, they won’t be a liability. The other said, Believe it or not, Pokemon GO. I started using it with my daughter last year and she knows our hometown like the back of her hand, plus she knows how far a hundred meters is!
There were other posts, debating methods of battery storage, reviewing fishing tackle based on weight and dimensions. “It’s a lot to take in,” Hallie said. “But the bag, all of this, is just for surviving the first 72 hours.”
“What happens after that?” I asked.
“You start over,” she said. “You find a safe place and set down roots. Like literally, because you have to grow food. Isn’t it fascinating?”
I was fascinated. Not in the way she was, fidgeting in her seat, twisting her fingers together. But still, I wanted to scroll through the forum, to find out how these people thought the world would end, to know where Hallie stood on the pads-versus-tampons packing debate. I wanted a bright backpack of my own to stuff full of metal canisters. I wanted to prepare for things I hoped would never happen.
“If it happens,” I said, “you’ll make it all the way.”
***
I had started waiting for Hallie's bus in the mornings, to maximize our time together. On a good day, her bus came eight minutes after mine, and we'd have time to watch a scene or two of Catfish before class. On a bad day, her bus came fourteen minutes later, which meant we'd only have time for a quick kiss before I walked her to French. The day after I came to her house was a perfect day—her bus arrived only three minutes after mine. That meant enough time to watch nearly half an episode. We hurried to our nook by the lockers, but when we sat down, she seemed distracted. She looked down, unwinding her earbuds slowly, without urgency.
“Or,” I said, “you could show me more about your bag-making.”
She took a look around to make sure no one else was watching, which gave me butterflies. “I’ll show you my spreadsheet,” she said. She opened her email on her phone and pulled it up, and there were so many colored boxes it took a moment to load. There were columns, which had category labels—Foodstuffs, Navigation, Hunting—and beneath each column was a list of items, colored based on a code—green for acquired, blue for purchased and in transit, orange for to-be-purchased-soon, pink for to-be-purchased-later. Beside every item that had not been purchased was an approximate cost and, in some cases, a link to a site that sold it. Some items were followed by single, double, or triple asterisks to indicate that they were difficult to find, only shipped from Asia, or were illegal for a teenager to buy online.
“My only income is dogsitting for my neighbor,” she said. “So it’s a slow process. I’ve got to keep track of what’s what.” She scrolled along in the spreadsheet, and then suddenly she bit her lip and said, “Well, enough of that. I wanna watch Craig confront Zoe.” Just before the document closed, I saw a short column labeled uncategorized, and I saw that the bottom item read backpack for Laura? Gauge interest.
***
That night I asked my mom to drive me to Walmart, and she told me that the Walton family were evil and paid their workers so little that some of them had to sleep in their cars, and she drove me to Target instead.
She went off to look at purses, and I went around back to the camping section. It was overwhelming, everything packaged in heavily taped boxes and organized by how much weight it could bear. There were at least a dozen types of bug zappers. I wanted something that would prove my curiosity without making me look like a freak. I paced down the aisle, passing picture after picture of happy, blonde, straight couples and their happy sporty children. I imagined what the forum members would say about each tent and tarp—too heavy. Not practical. Won’t last the first night. I was ready to give up when I spotted a dented package on a bottom shelf containing a small crank radio. I held it in my hands. I could picture myself in that cottage by the lake, wrapped in a light fleece blanket, turning and turning the crank.
I met my mom back by the checkout. “What’s that?” she asked, and I showed her. “What do you need that for?”
“Just trying to unplug,” I said.
She nodded. “Social media can be so overstimulating.”
Back at home, I cut open the box and freed the radio. It was plastic, black with a silver handle, and it fit in my hand. I unfolded the instruction sheet. One minute of hand cranking provides up to fifteen minutes of emergency radio, it read. Tuner receives AM, FM, and NOAA weather radio. I set it to the lowest volume. I turned the crank for a while, and then I let it play the weather. Ocean 72 degrees, a man’s voice said. Sea level at two feet. The current time is 7:32 PM Eastern Daylight Time. I turned the dial to FM. Nothing, a low crackle. I tried AM. The same.
I turned the crank some more just to get the feel of it. Then I set the radio back on the weather station and let it play. South winds five to ten miles an hour. Chance of rain is at 50 percent. Thunderstorms possible as a disturbance approaches from the West.
***
Later that week, Hallie's morning bus arrived nine minutes after mine—not perfect, but early enough that we could finish our episode from the day before. But I watched the students trickle down from bus 713, and she didn’t come. The driver closed the doors, and I started walking along the sidewalk toward the art wing. Are you coming? I texted her.
As I was rounding the corner to come in the side door, a mint green SUV sped into the drop-off lane and slammed on the brakes. The door flew open and Hallie stumbled out in a wrinkled shirt, clutching a textbook and a notebook to her chest. A woman’s voice called after her, “Next time you miss the bus, call a fucking cab, you hear me? And pull your little-boy pants up before the whole school sees your ass crack.”
Hallie gave her shorts a tight yank upward by the belt loop and marched past me, flung open the door and shouldered her way inside. The car pulled away as the second bell signaled first period was starting.
I followed her inside and up the stairs, where she was heading back toward the language wing. “Was that your mom?” I asked.
“Just go to art,” she said. “I’m in a bad mood. I didn’t have breakfast.”
“You can be in a bad mood,” I said. “Let me walk you to class.”
“You’ll slow me down, and I’m already late.”
“We could cut,” I said, and she stopped and turned to look at me. The other students rushed past us, bumping us with messenger bags and rolled-up posters. “We could walk to the Bagel Bin, I could buy you...a bagel.”
She sniffed and shuffled her books. “I just don’t wanna be in more trouble right now, okay? You of all people would get it, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”
“I love you,” she said. And then she added, “You don’t have to say it back.”
“I love you,” I said. “Really.”
She smiled, her eyes still red. Then she took a deep breath and continued up the steps, tugging at the waistband on her shorts as she went.
***
I was trying to quiet my nausea with a ginger ale and a pack of stale saltines when my mom came in from work that night.
“Did you see someone’s giving away a chicken coop down at the end of the road?” she said. “I’ve always kind of wanted baby chicks. Would it be a terrible idea?”
“Yeah, Mom,” I said. “They’ll get picked off by hawks and you’ll be sad. It’ll be like when the neighbors ran over the gardenias with the lawnmower. But bloodier.”
She patted me on the back and took one of my crackers from the packet. “These are pretty old, Laura-love,” she said. “Are you not feeling well?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just stressed.”
“They work you too hard. Your brain is still growing. It needs time to rest.”
“I’ll be OK. I think I just need to get through the week.”
“Speaking of which, what are you doing this weekend?” she said. “Because Dad and I want to have a cookout. Maybe you could make your strawberry shortcake?”
“It’s not my strawberry shortcake.”
“Oh, but you assemble it so well. Something about the way you do the Redi-Whip.”
“I was gonna do something with Hallie this weekend.”
“Is that your friend from the project? Her family’s mailbox was cute. Why don’t you invite her to come to the cookout? Is she a vegetarian?”
I broke a cracker in two. She’s my girlfriend, I would say. Is that OK? I opened my mouth, but all that came out was, “No, she’s not a vegetarian.”
In my room, I picked my phone up, then put it back down again. I wanted things to stay the way they were, study hall secrets and stolen kisses. I wanted us to keep learning only the best things about each other, hidden dimples and first grade memories. But then I thought of Hallie’s red eyes blinking back tears, the words I had said to her like a promise. Finally, I texted her. My mom’s having this cookout thing this weekend, and she said I could bring a friend. Would you want to come?
I like cookouts, she texted back. Are you sure you’re not worried about it?
They don’t suspect anything, I said. They think I like Matt Vicker.
You want me to bring anything?
No, they said there’ll be plenty of food. Watch out though. They’ll put on a nice front for you.
Better than my parents would do.
It’ll be kind of lame, I said, But I want to show you something I bought. A survival thing.
She didn’t respond for a while. Did she think I was creepy for latching onto her interest? Was she regretting saying the l-word? Finally she texted back, a link to a scientific study on rising sea levels. Whatever it is, good, she said. We might have to get out of here sooner than we think.
***
I thought about the length of 72 hours. It was about the amount of time between my invitation to Hallie and the cookout. Three days. Enough time that my parents were not yet worried about the number of chairs on the patio or the state of the yard, but yet, the fridge was already stocked with hot dogs and the cutlery drawer was jammed due to the addition of a new package of beaded drink markers. In 72 hours, a person could accomplish nothing. They could move from bed to couch and back eating dry ramen from the packet, thinking of nothing but the annoying sounds of children and motorcycle engines outside the window. Or they could start a company. They could conceive a child. They could drive from New Orleans to Seattle, glimpsing other great cities as they passed by. They could shoulder a backpack and trek west through the wind, faster than they’d ever felt it before, and using every gadget and every foil packet in their waterproof bag, they could outrun the storm forming out at sea, the one they wouldn’t have time to think about until later, the one that would destroy the town their family had lived in for four generations, the one that would wipe the coastline off the map. People like Hallie believed that when the world ended, some people would have 72 hours, and some people would have zero. I didn’t know what I thought about that. I just knew that I was fourteen and everything I thought I understood was slipping out from under me like a white tablecloth. I knew I loved a girl who was making time now to make time for later.
***
Everyone had arrived, and I started to hope that Hallie wouldn’t have a ride, that she would text saying, I’ll make it up to you - girls’ locker room during Coach Gibson’s lunch? But just after five, the mint green SUV pulled into the driveway. I caught a glimpse of its driver this time—a woman younger than I’d imagined, with hair fine like Hallie’s but redder, checking her phone but clearly not interested in it, just avoiding eye contact. Hallie stepped out of the car wearing her backpack, not her school backpack, which was a plain black Jansport, but her bug-out bag, neon and strappy and too big for her small frame. Her mom looked up and gave a brief wave like she hadn’t seen me there before, and then she backed up and drove off.
“I told her I was staying the night,” Hallie said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
I didn’t mind—the times I’d imagined falling asleep with my arm around her were beyond counting—but I was concerned. Hallie was good with adults. She would always hold up the snack line finding exact change for the lunch lady, asking her how many days were left until her wedding. It was unlike her to plan to stay the night somewhere uninvited.
I brought her around back to where my dad and Fred Hudson were grilling. “You could leave your bag there by the plants,” I suggested quietly, but she kept it with her.
“Hallie,” my dad said. “Welcome. We’ll have burgers out in a few—you want yours cheese or no cheese? Laura says you’re no vegetarian.”
“No cheese,” Hallie said. “Thanks.”
“Laura, did you offer Hallie a drink? Tequila shot? Just kiddin’.”
I propped open the cooler lid for her, and she fished around and pulled out a Dr. Pepper, tucked it into the side pocket of her bag. We stood on the patio trading quiet glances. The grill sizzled and suddenly I was starving, breathing in the smoky air. “What did you have to show me?” she asked.
I had cleaned my room meticulously for this moment, tucked away every paper and book, swept pens and hair ties and loose coins into desk drawers. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to find anything for a month, but I knew where I put my radio. I pulled it down from the shelf inside my closet and removed it from its box. “It’s just a cheap one,” I said. “It was the last one they had.”
I handed it over and she held it up in the light, ran her thumb over the dial. “No, it’s nice,” she said.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I might’ve cheaped out. It only plays the weather.”
She started cranking. “Well, what else would you need it for?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe we could listen to, like, romantic music together. While we eat our…beans and all that.”
She set the radio down on the desk, where it rumbled on quietly about the sunny day we were having, the clear night to follow. She touched my jaw under my ear and looked me in the eye. “I was going to pack a bag for you, too. But I didn’t have the time—or the money.”
“I’ll pack my own,” I said. “I want to. Don’t worry about the money.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow, and I want you to come with me.”
The room grew smaller. I grew smaller, too. I felt like I was tilting my head up at her, like she was holding something I wanted above her head and I was about to reach for it back.
I swallowed hard. “I have nice parents,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I noticed.”
“You could stay with us for a while. Even if I told them, I think.”
“And I appreciate that,” she said. “But I don’t want to stay with your parents. I want to go away. I don’t want you to go just for me—if you’re happy with your nice parents, stay—but I’m just saying, I want you to.”
We sat down on the bed together. Our knees touched. “Where would we go?” I asked.
“South on a Greyhound,” she said. “It wouldn’t be the wilderness. I have a friend in Atlanta, and another in Tampa.”
“Have you met them?” I asked.
“One of them, yeah. On Skype.” I liked the idea of us running away together. I liked it so much I was nauseous, and there was nothing in me to throw up besides the word yes. But I didn’t like buses, or rest stops, or laundromats. I didn’t like thinking of posters pinned to telephone poles and my mother leaving voicemails dripping with worry on Hallie’s mother’s phone. I didn’t like the vision I had of us returning to school days later with dirty hair and scowling faces, mad at each other for not making it, mad at the world for taking us back.
“Let’s go down and eat,” I said. “Please.”
She followed me back to the party and we ate unhappily, dripping ketchup onto paper plates in our laps. My dad brought out ice cream with cherries and we ate that too, slowly, licking around the spoon to prolong the time before we had to speak to each other again. The Lees and the Marinos were debating which Subaru was better for hauling kayaks with, the Forester or the Outback, and for once I didn’t mind the boredom. The flames of the citronella candles licked the air, but still I swatted mosquitos away from my pale, poorly shaven legs.
I left Hallie to listen to the merits of the Outback’s higher towing capacity and excused myself to help my mom with the dishes. I found her chewing on a cherry stem, trying to do that tongue-knot trick. “Mom,” I said, “Can Hallie spend the night?”
She nodded, looping her tongue around the inside of her mouth. “Sure thing, if it’s okay with her parents. You wanna take the air mattress upstairs? I don’t think this one has holes in it yet.”
I did, and it didn’t. The whir of the air pump filled my bedroom. Hallie moved around the mattress like a mechanic around a car, bending down to watch it inflate. I rocked the pump back and forth, willing it to go faster. When it was done, we looked to each other and nodded, our palms pressed beside each other on the taut vinyl.
“We could watch something,” I said.
“Sure,” she said.
We sat at the foot of the air mattress, pushing air up into the attached pillows, and I used my laptop to find an episode of Catfish the way we always did, on YouTube, out of order, clicking around until we found one that looked really good. I landed on one about a girl who pretended to be the Rock’s daughter, a tall, tanned bodybuilder online but a ninety-pound teenager in real life.
“We might've watched this one,” Hallie said.
“No, we haven’t,” I said. She didn’t argue, and I wondered if we were thinking the same thing, that anything we’d done together, I would’ve remembered.
We were quiet as we met the victim, a boy whose greasy bangs stuck to his temple while he babbled about finding his soulmate. This was the part where Hallie would usually touch me, wrap her cold hand around my thigh and make kissing noises next to my ear until I laughed and pushed her off me. Now, we just watched, feet tucked up under us where they couldn’t accidentally find each other in the dark.
When asked why she pretended to be the Rock’s daughter, the catfish didn’t hesitate. “Because that’s who I wish I was,” she said. Of all the things to be in the world, of all the careers and passions, she wanted to be the Rock’s ripped daughter, and if she couldn’t have that, at least she could have one person in the world who thought she was.
It was a great episode. It featured everything we loved, a fake celebrity, a double-reveal (the victim was photoshopping his pictures, too), a tearful fight, even a happy ending. But we didn’t joke, didn’t gasp, didn’t pause to debate the principle of second chances. The credits rolled and YouTube recommended Teen Mom: Where Are They Now?, and I closed my laptop.
“You were right,” Hallie said.
“I was right about what?” I asked.
“We hadn’t seen that one.”
We turned the lights out too early to sleep. I pulled my quilt up to my shoulders in my bed, turned away from her, then toward her. I kept my eyes closed. She won’t go, I thought, but I knew she might. I had to dig my fingers into my pillow to keep myself from crawling down there with her. I wanted to tell her I loved her. How unfair that I had only gotten to say it once.
After what felt like hours, I looked down and saw that she had fallen asleep before me. I burned with anger. Whatever was eating her up inside, making her leave, she could sleep through it. However much it hurt her to leave me, she was still lying there motionless, hair in her face, drooling a bit on the pillow. I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and put my earbuds in, listened to a few songs. The upbeat ones were agitating, the slow ones unbearable. I set it aside. I got up, crept across the room, and retrieved the radio from the place she had left it on the desk. I brought it back to bed, and at first I just held it, in my hands, and then against my chest. Then I started cranking, up, back, down, front. The plastic handle felt good, tense against my palm. I knew when I let go, the radio would play, the weather report moving across the state west to east and back again. It might wake her up. She might ask if I was having trouble sleeping, if I wanted to talk. Or she might grumble and pull the pillow over her head. But as long as I didn’t let go, it would be like this—a dark, safe place, quilts cool against our bare legs, one breathing in as the other breathed out. So I kept going, up, back, down, front, up, back, down, front, holding off the static, the sound, the morning.
Sarah Harshbarger holds an MFA from McNeese State University and is pursuing a PhD at the University of Tennessee. Her stories have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Grist, and So to Speak.
