Blooming on the Cusp of the Thaw
Zoë Johnson
Iron Mountain, MI ― 1886
You have kissed lots of different women in your life.
You’ve kissed preachers’ daughters with golden curls, kissed schoolteachers in dimly lit living rooms. You’ve kissed people with all your clothes on and without a stitch on either of you. You’ve kissed chastely outside of doors and heated beside windows with curtains drawn.
You figure you’ve got enough experience kissing you can say with certainty: people make too big a deal out of it.
It’s nice enough, you guess. Smooth, warm lips are pleasant but hands on hips or in hair are even better.
After a while, you decide you like what comes with kissing better than the kissing itself. The closeness and another person’s heat. Touching the place ribs give way to waist. The sound of breathing against your ear. Those are the good parts.
But the kissing itself? You don’t see what all the fuss is about.
Isaac shows up in Iron Mountain looking for work at the mine sometime in mid- July. He is sturdy, built with broad shoulders and a dark, coppery beard, accompanied everywhere he goes by an ever-blooming smile. The first time the two of you talk, he pokes fun at your accent. Of course it’s a little of everything, you reply, you’re Métis.
Isaac rushes to explain, laughing, his palms raised to you in a peacekeeper’s spread, that he finds it charming.
He takes to you like an imprinting duckling, eating lunch with you each afternoon, tossing his sweaty arm around your shoulders at the end of a workday with a jovial pat. You don’t exactly mind it. When the snow starts coming down in late October, you teach him how to snowshoe—something he picks up with surprising quickness.
He does that, you discover—picks things up quickly. Your scattered use of French and Ojibwe words. What mushrooms are good to eat and when. Which of the few restaurants in town have the best pasties—another novelty of the area he finds charming. Isaac is a quick study with them all. And not just with things someone else has taught him.
Observant. That’s the word you’ve been looking for; Isaac is a person who sees things.
Which would be a fantastic trait to have in a friend if you weren’t the kind of person you are. If you weren’t the way you are. You lay awake at night, arms sore and legs leaden from work, wondering and dreading if Isaac ever notices the way you look at him sometimes, the sort of way you’re not supposed to.
Isaac is a good friend, brings you broth when you catch a cold, offers to mend your trousers when the knee wears out. Isaac is also a good and godly man. He attends church every Sunday, forgives transgressions with ease, thanks God before each meal no matter how meager. And you know how it’s thought about, the kinds of thoughts you have, the kind of wanting you carry inside your chest.
Isaac is a good man. And you begin praying on your knees beside your bed every night for God to give Isaac a better, less dangerous friend.
You spend long winter nights in friends’ tiny closets of rooms, drinking and playing cards, and Isaac always tags along. He asks you to teach him how to ice fish and you spend countless days out on the ice warming the small space of the canvas shanty with your combined breathing.
You go to church with Isaac on Sundays, introduce him to the woman everyone calls “Auntie Elle” who runs the diner up the street. He tells you stories about his three sisters and the mountain ranges that raised him down in Appalachia.
It is a mild winter as far as winters in Iron Mountain go.
By the time the snow begins to thaw you have begun to wonder if this is something praying won’t be able to change about you.
The first time Isaac catches you looking at him the wrong way—the way you aren’t supposed to—it’s late March and the daffodils have begun dotting the landscape.
You’ve always admired early spring flowers like daffodils. All the fragile flowers who begin growing right on the cusp of the thaw. There’s always a chance that winter will have another resurgence after they’ve begun to blossom and one final ice storm or snowfall will freeze their stretching petals.
There’s something admirable about that—about possessing the courage to grow and bloom even when you can’t ever be sure if the coast is clear.
But when Isaac turns to you and meets your gaze, you feel nothing anywhere near courage. Your breath turns solid in your chest, unmovable and suffocating. The moment is blizzard-frozen and you are not observant like Isaac, not someone who sees things, and your mind reels as you fail to read the expression on his face.
But then Isaac smiles at you, the easy evergreen grin he always gives you, and you exhale. He turns back to the shirt he was mending, shoulders relaxed, foot tapping as he begins to whistle.
You spend the next few days terrified, scouring every interaction and expression that crosses Isaac’s face for any indication that he saw, that he understood the kinds of things you have tried so hard to keep from leaking out of you.
But Isaac is no different than before, quick to joke and quicker to grin.
The first time that the weather is kind, that air is warm and the sun banishes chilly clouds, Isaac insists the two of you visit Lake Antoine after church. You walk the five miles from town side by side until the glittering surface of the lake begins to appear down the road.
A light wind snatches at your hat, trying to lift it from your head and Isaac’s ensuing laughter is sunlight glittering on the lake surface. You wonder how it was you could forget your adoration of lake breezes.
Isaac catches you staring again and his tone is light, teasing, when he says that you sure do look at him a lot. Panic sends nausea squeezing at your stomach and for a wild moment you’re sure you’re going to puke onto his shoes.
But then you hear Isaac admit, voice hushed, that he really doesn’t mind it, the way you look at him, and it is every close call of falling rocks and pickaxes you’ve ever had in a mine all at once. It is shock and terror and the world tilting, smearing around you for a breathless second.
One of Isaac’s calloused hands comes to rest heavy on your shoulder, the other on your cheek, and his grin is snow-melting in its warmth. There is a wild thrumming beneath your ribs—the feeling of a plucked string singing out to know what his beautiful smiles feel like against your skin.
You’ve kissed a lot of women in your life. You figured you’d had enough experience kissing to say it is, by and large, an underwhelming activity.
But when Isaac kisses you, you inhale in shock and startled delight and when your eyes slide closed, there are daffodils blooming across the backs of your eyelids.
A hush settles over the restless corners of your insides in a sort of soul-deep inhale, and all you can think is: Oh. This is what it’s supposed to be like.
This, here: your hands in Isaac’s hair and the fragile blossom of you unfurling to the warm seasons of his lips.
Zoë Johnson
Zoë Johnson is a queer nonbinary writer from mid-Michigan and an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. They received their MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May of 2020. Shortlisted for PRISM International's 2019 and 2021 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction, their work has been published in Sonora Review Online, The Polyglot, Eastern Iowa Review, beestung and more, as well as been anthologized in "Lascaux Prize Vol. 6", and Public Poetry’s 2019 finalists anthology: ENOUGH. Their work is forthcoming as part of the second edition of Trans Bodies, Trans Selves from Oxford University Press. When not writing, Zoë spends their time doting on their cats Strawberry and Sundae, learning their tribal language of Anishinaabemowin, and accidentally scaring rabbits and deer while berry-picking.