You took a stick and drew a circle in the leaves around us and the fire. “No one comes in or out.” We teased the dog until she learned the rules. When night came, we went inside the trailer.
We weren’t using our phones. That was another rule. There were no outlets, only softly glowing sconces powered by a panel on the roof. There was no shower. These weren’t rules, only facts. The toilet was this eco-friendly Space Age thing lined with something like aluminum foil that closed over your waste and twisted around and made a whirring noise, and opened up again fully clean. There was limited water.
When it was really dark, we switched off the sconces and watched the darkness until we were scared it was watching us back. I went outside and pissed on the fire while the dog pissed on the leaves. We opened a bag of chips and a six pack and played rummy on the fold-out table between the bed and the kitchenette. I said I didn’t remember beer being so sweet, and a few minutes later, you said the same thing. We both laughed because you must not have heard me.
Then we were quiet for a long time staring at our cards. I cracked another beer, cracked one for you even though yours wasn’t done, and waited. Eventually, you got up to use the bathroom. When you came back, you said you thought it had happened.
I’d filled the waiting minutes reading a magazine that was laid on the bed when we arrived. The magazine was about people renting their trailers all over the country. Nadine’s trailer was near Zion National Park. Brent’s was deep in Minnesota.
I’d meant to let myself get caught looking at your cards, but I was too busy reading about trailers, and you surprised me.
The aluminum bag whirred, and the bathroom door opened. The dog and I both looked up. You came outside and washed your hands in the kitchenette sink.
“I think that was it.”
We hugged, me crouching under the trailer’s low ceiling.
“That’s good,” I said, and I didn’t have anything else to say.
Later, I knelt at the toilet and with a finger palpated the eye of the aluminum bag, but I didn’t know what I should be looking for. Maybe a receipt I’d carried crumpled in my wallet for weeks, but couldn’t find when I finally needed it. After all, you said you thought, not that you knew.
I knew that even much later, I would remember the trailer, the toilet, you drawing a circle in the leaves. The trailer air fouled with memory-making.
The dog died. That was how we knew that time was passing. We measured it by the night in the trailer, and whether the dog was still alive or had already died. Frost heaves broke our flower bed into beds, and while I stamped them down, you slipped away. Long after the dog died, you came bulb-shaped with your separate success to tell me what I’d thought but not known to name, how wanting doesn’t stop just because the thing is gone for good.
I wanted to buy a trailer of my own and park it in the street out front. I wanted to fill my trailer with debris in layers so my back stooped and you’d climb to me up a ziggurat of cereal boxes and out-modeled phone chargers. I wanted to lock myself in the bathroom and push through the toilet’s aluminum eye and curl myself around the receipt I couldn’t find.
“You feel okay?” I asked.
“Just cramped.”
We played solitaire and then war. When the beer ran out, I took the dog on a long walk through the trees, lighting our way with my phone’s flashlight. By the time we got back, you were asleep.
For you, I thought, it was already morning. We were packing up and driving home.
Jeff Bakkensen lives in Boston. Recent work has appeared in A-Minor Magazine, Oblong Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review
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