Elin and Anna

Chapter 1: 1

CHAPTER 1 — Too Small for Two

They left just after three. Dad reversed until the bumper kissed the snowbank, then pulled out in a slow arc that threw slush against the fence. Mum lifted her hand from the passenger window. I lifted mine because that was what you did.

When the engine sound thinned and went, the cabin did not become quieter. It became ours.

Anna shut the door with her hip and knocked snow off her boots onto the mat. The zip at her collar had gone crooked. I saw that and then I saw the stove, which needed another log if we were going to keep the place from smelling of cold cloth.

“Two nights,” she said.

“I heard.”

“You can manage without them telling you when to feed the fire.”

“I can feed a fire.”

She almost smiled and hung her coat. The hook sat high. She had to reach. The sweater under the coat lifted and showed a strip of skin above her waistband, winter-pale, with the small dent of her spine. I looked at the wood basket instead.

I brought in more wood and stacked it too neatly, as if neatness could prove we were still the same people we had been an hour ago. Anna filled the kettle. The tap coughed air and then ran. Outside, the snow kept coming in that quiet way that makes a rented place feel farther from the road than it is.

The cabin was one main room, a kitchen end with a narrow run of counter, a table that sat too close to the sofa, and a stove that threw heat in a short, greedy circle. Our parents’ room was shut. Ours were not. The bathroom door stuck unless you lifted it on the hinge.

Anna put rice on and opened a tin of something that claimed to be stew. I set two plates. The good ones had a hairline crack. I gave her the other.

“You always do that,” she said.

“Do what.”

“Give me the plate that isn’t broken.”

“It isn’t chivalry. I don’t want the stew in my lap.”

Anna snorted and stirred. Steam fogged the small window over the sink. Her hair had come loose at one side from the wind. A piece of it stuck to her cheek and she left it there. I noticed that longer than I needed to, then reached past her for the salt.

There was no gap between her and the counter. My chest brushed her back. Not much. Enough that I felt the knit of her sweater and the heat she had already collected from standing over the pot. I said sorry because that was the correct word, and she said it was fine, and I took the salt and went to the table as if the table had been the point.

We ate with our socks near the stove. The stew was salty. The rice had gone a little gluey. Anna ate anyway, the way she always did, as if food were a task you finished. I watched her wrist when she lifted the fork and then I stopped watching her wrist.

“We should walk tomorrow,” she said. “If it lets up.”

“It won’t let up.”

“Then we can sit here and become furniture.”

“You’re already furniture.”

She kicked my ankle under the table, not hard. I kicked back.

After the plates I washed and she dried, because she hated wet cuffs and I did not care. The sink was shallow. Water ran over my knuckles and down the inside of my sleeve. Anna reached across me for a glass I had missed. Her breast pressed my upper arm through two layers of wool. She was not flat, the way I was. I felt the difference as a simple physical fact and then I felt my face heat for no reason I was prepared to name, and I laughed once, short, as if the glass had been the joke.

“Sorry,” she said.

“You live here too.”

She flicked water at my neck. I flicked it back. A drop went into the collar of her sweater and she swore, mild, and we were sisters again in the small wet space by the tap.

We left the rest. The stew pot to soak. The cracked plate on the rack. I put another log in and sat on the sofa because there was nowhere else that faced the heat properly. Anna stood in the middle of the room and looked at the dark windows, then at the door, then at me.

“It feels later than it is,” she said.

“That’s the snow.”

She sat down. The sofa was a two-seater in name only. Her thigh came against mine at once, from hip to knee, because there was no honest way to sit otherwise. She did not move. I did not move. The blanket on the back of the sofa smelled of other people’s winters.

I could have shifted to the arm. I stayed where I was and told myself it was the fire, and the short heat, and the fact that moving would have made the sitting into a decision.

Anna leaned forward to poke the stove door with the iron. The movement put her shoulder under my jaw for a second. Her hair touched my mouth. I turned my face a fraction and laughed, too quickly.

“Your head is in the way,” I said.

“Your whole body is in the way. This thing isn’t built for people.”

"Then sit on the floor.”

“You sit on the floor. You’re smaller.”

“I’m not a cushion.”

She sat back. The contact returned, solid and unremarkable if I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be. I kept my hands on my own knees. The stove ticked. Somewhere in the wall a pipe made a sound like a knuckle.

Anna yawned without covering it.

“If you fall asleep there I’ll leave you,” I said.

“You won’t. You’ll fetch another blanket and complain.”

She was right. I would. That was still the shape of the evening: wood, dishes, the two of us talking in the same old rhythm, nothing planned except not freezing and not making a mess our parents would walk into on Sunday.

I got up to check the door latch. The cold came under it in a thin line. When I turned, Anna had pulled the blanket over her legs and left half of it open, an invitation so ordinary it ...