Olivia groans to turn over. Lowers in tone to arc, extend limb, curl then stretch finger and toe. Peaks as though a question to final slump sink into warm bedding.
Bedwarmers are Manuel and Josh, Jordanne and Jordan and Sparrow, Shoe and Shuu and Rosina and Ritsuya and some recent acquaintance by name of Anxiety Max. As much warm bed as bedwarmer. Bodies fit together in full relax of slumber.
Olivia worked rows yesterday weeding. Shovel and spading fork and bruised feet from kicking tool sink into clay-packed earth and glove to pull taproot flora at base of woody stalk. She’d stretch again but more conscious now she’s conscious of an ill-aimed shove or prod by happenstance of her straining limbs.
Anxiety Max’s decidedly New Brunswick francophone accent answers Olivia’s unintended question.
“No,” Olivia groans. “We’ve fuck all today until after noon.”
She figures Max is Maxine but can’t figure how to ask without being rude, could have been Maxine, Maxime, Max-suffix-therein. Could be but for ease of anglophone spaces and brevity of her appearance, brevity Max.
She has no clue what to figure Anxiety.
Anxiety Max, unminded to unknown ponderings, gets up to boil water. Recent additions were always bright-eyed and proactive and yet to adjust to the established mood of luxuriating languid every availed moment, but Anxiety Max boils water and sorts a pot for coffee and another for tea with a calm ease. Anxiety Max does everything with a calm ease. She approaches and tasks and even every laugh with a calm ease.
Wary at first, Olivia has started to find this enchanting. She watches from the assortment of bodies in rhythm and movement only breath deep and slow as Anxiety Max checks mugs for dregs and dried pools, collects not enough clean ones for the bodies present, washes enough and then all the rest.
Olivia gets up to dry them. The cloths here are old flour sack cotton, machine-hems where frayed hand-stitched by hands that now stir.
Coffee and tea fill the space to rouse the bedwarmers. They wake to each their own unique twist of labour-spent muscle overnight rested.
It’s impressive, nice even, to start a mostly rest day earlier than they would have. Olivia appreciates the extra time to linger languid over the mug warming her hands before the sun takes a turn.
In the fields, they’ll work any stiffness out of muscle not addressed by waking flexes and shuffling rise to personal task before after noon work. Seated on clay-packed earth between what in small its part is their meals as well, they’ll break bread and words and liquids sweet and intoxicating. With no light to work by, they’ll into pair and trio and quartet, leaving Olivia to offer a morning-cleaned mug to Anxiety Max. Accepting offers invitation for Olivia to sit alongside her.
From the embankment bearing the seacans made their home, the rows of growth reach until distant perimeter clear, exact, perpendicular. Olivia exhales exhaustion of the day’s work, finds in the fledgling camaraderie refuge in Anxiety Max’s calm ease.
They watch bats hunt in meager moon-sliver light.
They kiss as though they could kiss each other forever. As though they have always been. As though they always would. As though they ache to. As though they won’t, far too soon, never cross paths again. As though they won’t ache all the rest of their lives for this kiss.
