Page 34 of Hunger

I don't know when I stopped being afraid. The fear has been gone for days, ever since I picked up the rosin boxes from the ledge and brought them inside. Somewhere in that hour something in me decided that whatever this was, it wasn't the thing it should have been.

I wait.

The minutes pass. I don't know how many. I don't look at the clock. The cool edge in the room is steady now. It doesn't move.

Something shifts at the foot of my bed.

I don't move or open my eyes. My heart pounds.

The weight on the bed shifts. Closer. The cold radiating off it moves with it.

Then something brushes my hair from my face.

The touch is so light I almost don't feel it. A long finger — longer than a finger should be — sliding the loose strand of hair back from my cheek and tucking it behind my ear. The finger is cold. Colder than the air. Colder than anything that should be in a heated bedroom in Nebraska. The cold runs along the side of my face where the finger has touched and then settles into the skin like a bright shock.

I keep my eyes closed. I'm breathing. I'm breathing slowly, carefully, the way I've learned to breathe when I'm trying not to give myself away.

The finger lifts.

I think it's gone. The cold is still there but the touch is gone. I'm sure the touch is gone.

It returns.

This time the back of the finger draws along my jawline. Slowly. From the soft place behind my ear to the curve of my chin. The cold trails behind it. My skin rises into the contact without asking my permission. I'm pressing my jaw up to meet it. My body has decided things without me.

The finger reaches my chin and stops.

I exhale.

The cold against my jaw stays where it is. The whole room goes still in a way I've never felt a room go still before. The hum of the refrigerator hasn't changed. The wind hasn't stopped. But everything close to me has stopped — the cold, the shape on the bed, the breath that isn't mine.

I don't move or open my eyes.

I wait.

The finger lifts. The weight on the bed shifts. The cold recedes. The shifting at the foot of the bed pulls back.

I lie there.

I don't hear footsteps, or the latch, or the window. I don't hear anything except the wind and the hum of the refrigerator. The cold edge in the room thins and fades.

I open my eyes.

The room is empty. The curtain is drawn. The window is closed. The desk lamp is dark. The violin case is on the floor where I left it.

I sit up.

My hands are shaking. Not the way they shook the morning of the rosin boxes. This is the shaking that comes when something inside you has woken up and doesn't know what to do with itself.

I touch my own jaw. I run the pad of my finger along the path the cold finger took. My skin is hot. There's no mark, nothing to show that I wasn't alone a minute ago.

I lie back down.

I don't sleep. I lie on my back and look at the ceiling and replay it in my body until morning starts to find the edges of the curtain, thin and gray.

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Farkas