They are standing on the woman’s porch. The woman and her friend. They stare at the road in front of them. Empty. And beyond the road, an apple orchard. And beyond that: sky. Night sky. Stars, and a hint of moonrise.
The woman is smoking a cigarette. She doesn’t usually, but the occasion calls for it. She takes a long, deep inhale. She coughs out the smoke.
The woman’s friend also doesn’t smoke. She takes the cigarette to her lips, coughs. “That is disgusting,” she says.
“It’s relaxing,” the woman says.
“It’s toxic,” the friend says.
Then there’s silence. What the woman could say: I truly didn’t want it. Or: I don’t ever want one. Or: thank you. Beneath the cigarette smoke, her body aches. That hollow feeling. Like a shell. Like she was never more than just a container.
The friend says, “You’re so quiet.” And then, softly: “You’re scaring me.”
The woman sighs. The friend drove her, and now she won’t leave. There’s something to the idea of being alone right now. But the woman could never say it. The thing didn’t just happen to her, to her body. The friend was there, holding her hand, shielding her from the cardboard signs. The vicious face of one man in particular: he spat at them. Not on them but at them. So much anger in one body.
“I’m tired,” the woman finally says.
“Of course you are,” says the friend. “You should lie down.”
“Yes,” the woman says.
But neither woman moves. In front of them: the empty road, the apple orchard. They watch the night grow. The barn owl who lives next door swoops over the trees, hunting, elegant.
The woman says, “I don’t know why this is hard.”
The friend says, “Of course it’s hard. Your body.”
The woman says, “My body.”
The friend says, “It’s a loss. A loss you get to choose. But a loss all the same.”
The woman takes another drag from the cigarette. She had insisted they buy them on the way home. The yellow box. They had to buy a lighter, too. She wonders now what the man at the gas station thought. Cigarettes and a lighter: what kind of meaning there. Not a regular smoker, just a circumstantial one. Maybe he imagined a scenario for them. A boyfriend cheated. A relative passed. Or maybe sisters, and they had to put down the family dog.
The woman considers living inside of one of those scenarios. The rightful grief she could feel. This isn’t the same. This isn’t a kind of wishing a being back to life or wishing a different decision had been made. This is a kind of loss that is an extraordinary relief. Gratitude. Freedom. And the horror that someone else a few states away can’t. How to explain that.
The cigarette is a stub now, mostly filter. The friend takes it from the woman and crushes it beneath her foot.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s go inside. It’s getting cold out here.”
The woman notices the cold abruptly. She’s shivering. Still, she says, “Give me a minute.”
The friend looks skeptical at first. Then she nods and moves through the door into the house.
The woman is alone on the porch. The apple orchard dips into darkness, and she hears the owl, imagines her flapping her wings. The woman pulls another cigarette from the box, but doesn’t light it. She chews the filter, watches the sky. The moon rises just as the orchard vanishes from view. Slowly, the outlines of trees reappear, cast in silver. So much beauty. Such a small body to carry it.