The sentence hangs there. I will treasure it and examine all of its intricacies later: The way his eyes must have been on me and my boxes full of my life.

“What do you do?” I ask.

“Mostly fix every engine in town. What about you?”

“I’m not really sure yet. I just quit my job.”

“Must be nice.”

“I grew up at The Acres,” I blurt out.

“Out by the Meat Quarry?”

“You know it?”

“Of course, that place is a legend around here. I’ve never seen it. What is it like?”

His eyes peer into mine. It is live wires when he does that, the voltage between us.

“It was beautiful. I used to harvest meat with my father and brother.”

He sits back.

“I’m impressed, a young kid doing that.”

“I was great at it. Why do you love motors?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“I am.”

“I’ll allow it. I love motors because working on them teaches you to think different ways around a problem. It’s personal work, meditative even. The sum of all parts makes them come alive. That’s fascinating to me.”

I picture my young arms ripping meat from the quarry walls, a small flesh-covered machine.

“I think I understand.”

The sentence hangs thick between us — it is bursting with recognition, the light of our minds meeting.

“Did you know we’re all engines, because by their most basic definition, engines are machines that convert energy into motion?”

My heart responds with a crescendo, a wave that rises and holds high as we talk long into the night, until we are out in the midnight gravel on the road outside of the bar in the moonlight, until his lips are on mine and a new song begins.

I WAKE IN BED ALONE, IN LOVE, NUDE. I grind my bare body into the soft bedding, the comforter warm on my bare skin. I picture his face and grin up into the morning light.

◆An engine is designed to convert one form of energy into mechanical energy

◆The first internal combustion engine was built in 1807 and was used to power a boat up a river in France

◆Karl Benz is credited with building the first car engine in 1886

◆A large engine can have up to 1,400 different parts

VISION

Henry and I take our heads off in order to be intimate.

“Be gentle,” I say.

I am nervous, heart racing, eyes fluttering as Henry slides my head from my neck.

I see the world from strange new angles: flashes of the ceiling, then Henry’s face, then the lower half of his body.

I look up at our bodies from my new place on the floor. I can feel the wood against the newly raw end of my neck.

A body can control itself without a head and mine does. I slide his head off of his neck and place it next to mine on the floor.