I wake up, and he’s not in bed beside me. But I smell coffee, and I smile.

He comes back, naked, with two steaming mugs of coffee. “Six thirty,” he says. “Figured it’d be nice to have it together in bed.”

“How do you know it’s six thirty?” I ask. “There are no clocks.”

A shrug. “We’ve had coffee together at six thirty just about every day since we met. I just know, now.”

“Oh.”

We drink our coffee together, in what is now our cabin.

And I wonder, do we ever have to leave? Or can we just…stay here? Can this be life?

I look at Nathan, and I know the answer.

The Art To Living

“Mr. Crenshaw, please—it’s for your own good. You won’t even feel a thing, I promise. Just sit still.”

“How in th’damn-hell is you gonna know what’s best for me, little girl? I ain’t had a shot or a pill or a stitch in m’whole damn life, and I ain’t about-ta start now.”

“I know that you stepped on a rusty nail, barefoot, never saw anyone for it, and that you’ve never, by your own admission, had a tetanus shot.”

“So? I’m fine.”

I sigh. “You have a fever of a hundred and one—”

“I worked through worse fevers than this afore.”

“You are having trouble swallowing, I can tell, and I’d render a guess that, even if you’d never admit to it, you’re experiencing jaw pain. You have elevated blood pressure and heart rate. Soon, you’ll be experiencing seizures, or at least, involuntary spasming or jerking.” I speak over his protestations of so what. “This is what we in the medical profession call lockjaw, Mr. Crenshaw, and it is, if left untreated, lethal.”

That quiets him.

“And by lethal, I do not mean quickly or painlessly. I mean, you will experience spasms that could fracture your spine and leave you paralyzed. You could experience lasting brain damage. Your jaw, as the name suggests, will lock up and render you unable to eat, which means you’ll survive on a feeding tube, for as long as you do survive, which won’t be long. With a tetanus shot and antibiotics—meaning allowing me to treat you—we can mitigate quite a lot of this. There is no cure for tetanus, but we can manage the symptoms.”

Mr. Crenshaw, clad in dirty denim overalls, bare chested under them, with a filthy, ragged red International Harvester hat on his graying, thinning hair, barefoot, burly and overweight and recalcitrant and tougher than shoe leather and roofing nails, lets out a gusty sigh. “Fine. I’d rather die than have a feedin’ tube shoved down my throat, let alone be paralyzed and have to have my ornery old wife wipe my ass. But if it wasn’t life or death, I wouldn’t be here.”