One Minute Thirty-Five Seconds

She wakes to a white-bellied blur, a frantic smudge of a bird looping the motel room. It jerks sideways like something hunting or hunted, bounces off the window and scrabbles at the mirror. Its wings pop so loudly, the sound ricocheting off the pressboard walls, that at first she thinks there are dozens of them. Hundreds.

“Get the window.”

Her voice is wet with sleep. She elbows Coby lightly and he sits up. “Open it, let it out.”

But he is already out of bed, chasing the bird around the room in nothing but his socks. He is thinner than ever, his legs sticks, his stomach a wrung sponge. Light from the cracked window pools at his hip bones and dances along his swinging arms, down his back. She pulls the blanket over her head, but he grabs the corner and tugs until she tumbles off the bed. She is thinner too, her breasts nearly only the dark nipples, tight in the cold morning air. Her eyes dark circles that spread out and across her nose, brown going yellow at the edges. But her hips are still wide, thighs strong as levers.

She stands, pulling another corner tight and holding it over her head. Their arms swing in sync, both laughing now.

“Higher,” she says, and they come around the bird, keeping it between the blanket and the window. It flies in a cramped circle, tighter and tighter as they shuffle forward, glancing off the window pane with every pass until it dives straight into the blanket, trying to pierce the thin cotton with its beak. Areli gropes behind her with one hand until she finds the doorknob, twists, and the door jumps open. She nods at Coby, and they shake the blanket until the bird zigzags out.

They stand laughing in the open doorway, naked, sweating, starting to shiver, trying to watch the bird fly away but losing it against the clouds. In front of them, the parking lot is scattered with old cars and RVs angled haphazardly between the evenly-spaced, perfectly parallel white lines. A tall patch of ragweed and a chain link fence, then the mumbling highway stretching from dark to dark, punctuated with bubbles of grainy yellow streetlight. A caravan of early morning delivery trucks rumbles past, downshifting up the hill to the black silhouette of the horizon.

Areli’s laugh fades first.

“I don’t like sleeping all night,” she says.

“Sometimes we couldn’t even sleep through the night. She’d wake us up every hour. Remember?”

“Don’t use that word, not about her. I don’t want to. I don’t want to have to.”

Coby wraps her in himself, in the blanket. The doorknob is cold in his palm.

He waits for her to tell him what to say, what to do.

Closes the door.

Walks her back to bed.

Curls against her in the quiet.

Watches sleep hover overhead, just out of reach, suspended by strings from the ceiling.