The straight and narrow of it.

The day we moved into the apartment above the stable, the field was all mud and roots and smelled like wet cardboard. The green stubble of spring had started littering the landscape, and I had already forgotten every promise I had made to her. I was smoking cigarettes then, only half of one at a time, and the loft apartment was a sickening sweet combination of stale smoke, hayfever, and those orange-scented candles she lit in the long evenings.

The spring passed quickly into summer. She cooked simple meals on the single burner. I chopped wood in the pasture and sold it for grocery money. We fucked each other during the evenings mostly—the loft was too hot during the day to bare the touch of the other’s skin. After the sun went down, thought, it was nice with the lit candles and the dirty dishes sitting on the floor by the mattress. Once she fell asleep, I'd listen to her breathe and the cars sigh as they passed nameless through the night.

By the time the hottest days of summer made the wood floors sweat, we didn’t have to say much to hurt each other. After fights, she would walk to the grocers to buy fruit and return with blue plastic bags and a sweat stain in the small of her back. Neither of us ate the fruit and every time I threw it rotten into the woods behind the stable, I wanted to stop loving her. Sometimes I tried to make it stop, but the grass grew tall in the field, high past the hem of that one long red dress, so the love stayed and I decided one day at a time to wait to leave.

“The leaves won't be bright colors this fall,” she said one morning, laying naked on top of the sheets.

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“Yes."

"How can you tell?"

"Not enough rain this summer and the temperature doesn't fall at night.”

“How do you know these things?” I asked but I knew the answer.

“John used to tell me.”

“How the fuck did John know them?”

“I don’t know. From being born on a farm, I guess.”

I pulled on jeans and told her John was a fucker and that the fall would be the prettiest one she’d ever seen. It wasn’t. The prettiest leaf I found was a sickly-yellow one. The tall grass fell quickly. It was golden for a single afternoon, but was grey and brown the day after and stayed that way until I left.