-eng- Sleeping | Cousin -rj353254-

Not waking—just a small, mammalian turn. Her hand slipped from her stomach and fell over the edge of the chaise. Her fingers brushed my knee.

No lights. No fan. No excuse to stay in my assigned room, a closet-sized box of heat and stale pillows.

But every summer since, when the magnolias drop their petals and the air grows thick and heavy, I think about that porch. That silence. That impossible, sleeping closeness. And I wonder if she remembers whispering those words, or if the dream swallowed them whole.

I never told her.

Not because she was beautiful, though she was—the sharp line of her jaw, the dark fan of her lashes, the slow rise and fall of her chest. But because she was there . Unaware. Unguarded. Sleeping people exist in a different dimension, one where they cannot see you looking, cannot catch you staring. They are utterly vulnerable, and that vulnerability is a kind of power you steal without permission.

I found her on the wide screened-in porch. The lake beyond was black glass, and the only sound was the rhythmic, quiet scrape of a branch against the screen. Lena lay on the long wicker chaise, one arm thrown over her head, the other resting across her stomach. She was wearing a thin white tank top and shorts. Her mouth was slightly open. Asleep.

I stopped breathing.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because the moment I spoke, the spell would break. She would wake, and the knowing would begin, and the summer would become something I had to apologize for.

It was the summer of the broken air conditioner, the summer the magnolia trees dropped their petals like crumpled love letters onto the driveway, and the summer I learned that a sleeping person is a locked room.

My cousin, Lena, was two years older, three inches taller, and infinitely more dangerous than me. She spoke in fragments of French she’d picked up from old movies, wore a silver ring on her thumb, and could hold a cigarette in a way that made the act of burning tobacco look like philosophy. Our families had rented the same lake house for a week, a truce disguised as a vacation, and on the third night, the power went out. -ENG- Sleeping Cousin -RJ353254-

Then she shifted.

A loon called across the water. Long and low and sad. Lena’s fingers twitched, then curled slightly, as if she were holding onto something in a dream.

Either way, I have never sat so still in my life. And I have never felt so entirely awake. Not waking—just a small, mammalian turn

I froze.

So I stayed silent. I stayed still. And when the power flickered back on an hour later—the hum of the refrigerator, the distant click of a lamp—she drew her hand back slowly, turned onto her side, and kept sleeping.