Curio Vignettes 05 Exposure Read Online Free PDF

make sure the flue’s open.”
    I kneel beside her to see what she means.
    “Otherwise the room will fill with smoke. I’ve forgotten that step. It’s the worst.” She rolls up her sleeve and fusses with a squeaky lever.
    Next she shows me her father’s patented arrangement of crumpled balls of newspaper and stacked logs—smaller sticks on the first layer, thicker ones crisscrossed on top.
    “Now we need matches.”
    After a search, I find some on the living room mantle.
    “And all you do is light the paper,” she says.
    I strike a match and hold it to the newspaper. We sit back on our heels and watch as the flames spread to the smaller kindling, yellow tongues licking.
    “Ta da.” She balances a metal folding screen on the hearth. “You’ve made a fire.”
    “I assisted.”
    “Now we just have to keep an eye on it and add a fresh hunk of wood when it starts to peter out.”
    A branch cracks and shifts, sending orange sparks chasing up into the chimney.
    How nice to be taught something by Caroly. Something practical, that is, beyond the lessons she’s offered regarding my capabilities, out in the wider world.
    I imagine us strolling around art galleries and museums, she teaching me terms I’ve never heard before, enthusing about the thing she loves most. Strange, catching myself looking forward to such outings, and with only a hint of fear tainting the idea.
    When people speak of prostitutes needing to be saved from their vocation, they mean danger, exploitation, degradation. It was never that for me. In turns, I offered my clients therapy, escape, affection, decadence. They didn’t take—I gave. I liked giving. Too much.
    If Caroly saved me from anything, it was my own lack of momentum. She dragged me from the quicksand of my slow, passive decline into inevitable hermitdom, from a reality I hadn’t stepped back from enough to even fully see. I’d enjoyed the sinking, the snug safety of my descent. Had we never met, I’d have eagerly drowned in all that reassuring immobility. But she made me choose my life instead, and I took hold of the rope. It seems I’d rather stand shaking beside her than atrophy in comfort, all alone.
    Since I’ve rejoined the outside world, I’ve found there are benefits—benefits beyond keeping Caroly in my life, which can’t be discounted by any means.
    I’ve noticed that the days are longer. Not simply because time passes more slowly when you’re distressed, but because the world is suddenly bigger. There are so many things to see and hear, so many new faces to study. Staying inside, it was like eating nothing but chocolate for three years. Reliably lovely and pleasing, yet my palate grew lazy. Each meal blended into the last. Outside, it is like a buffet. So much variety it shocks the senses, and though I don’t love every flavor I’m fed, the choice is dizzying. So frightening, often, but also so rich.
    We rinse the soot and wood flecks from our hands in the kitchen, switching off all the lights as we make our way back to the bedroom. She tosses two pillows before the crackling hearth and takes my hand. We sit cross-legged side by side, the fire nearly too hot but all the more exotic for it, with the cool air at our backs.
    After a long, spacey silence, I ask, “What are you thinking of?”
    “I’m thinking how lovely it would be if life was just like this.”
    “Like what?”
    “Just this.” She rubs my thigh. “Sitting in front of a fire at night, drinking wine. Someplace so quiet.”
    “You’d miss the city.” This place suits me more than I’d ever imagined, but Caroly loves culture and shopping and events, cafés and parks with interesting people to watch. She likes the bustle, content to quietly observe, curator that she is. We’re not compatible that way. If this love stays in bloom, what shape might a compromise take? A home on the outskirts of a smaller city? Where she could leave in one direction for the activity when she wished, I in the other,