“My toes are cold,” she says.

Those are her words, but not her meaning. Her meaning is lost somewhere in the space between Orion and his dogs as they creep slowly, predictably across the sky. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s participating in a ritual; something I do every year at some point during Orion’s ride through the cold. I don’t always do it on the same day, but I always wait until it’s cold. Cold and high in the air, that’s the best way to see him; a large, mostly treeless hill four miles from the epicenter of my redneck upbringing. I assume that it’s still okay for me to come here. I still know how to work a slip-style cattle gate and put the chain back just so, just like I found it. I assume I’m still allowed here, at least a few bits of me. Last year I came just before sunset, alone, and passed the old farmer whose land my hill lounges upon. He waved, but they all wave. For a good week after my yearly drive out to the hill I wave at people in town. They all don’t wave.

“He’s my champion, did you know that?” I say, my breath streaming out in front of me.

“Orion?” A short puff of white from the blanketed shape next to me.
“Yeah.” Just as short, but bigger.
“Interesting. How long has that been going on?”
“Long enough for it to be important to me.”
“How long does that take?”
“Not too long. Depending on the relative divinity of the object, or dare-I-say, person being admired.”
“Stop trying to charm me.” She’s smiling though.
“Who’s trying? I know better than to think I need to try.”
“Right.”
“Right.”

We both smile now, mutual remembrance of loud outbursts of this word across pillows and living rooms. We live with many of these ghosts; many words and touches and temperaments that shamble around the beds and houses in which we make our new lives. She doesn’t know it yet, but twenty yards behind us is a large oak tree, stripped naked by fifty years of wind and loneliness; on this tree are the names of all the women I’ve ever loved; offerings to Orion, the Hunter. It’s not as pathological as it sounds, really. It started in high school; a bawdy teenage mark of conquest, of consummation. But later, like most things begun accidentally, it became a ritual. A kind of declaration. Lest I forget the things sitting upon my tongue.

“I’m the quiet one, or so the legend goes, so where are you that you’re so quiet?” She is peering around the blanket in which she is thoroughly wrapped, a little wrinkle at the inside edge of each eyebrow. “Nowhere better than here,” I say, winking.

I am an incorrigible flirt. Especially tonight. I know no bounds, none at all. Not our past, not my patterns or principles or any lofty, philosophical statements. I am the conqueror of all bullshit, all small talk; all things small and subtle and soft. All I’m waiting for is a word, and she knows it. Knows it better than I do, probably. Somewhere in the front of my mind, I am at least entertaining the thought that I might not be trying to seduce her. She knows better. I’ll be trying to seduce her until I die, or until she gets married. Death or marriage; it might not even end there. The whys and hows of this phenomenon are as complex and confusing as any puzzle ever imagined, but she plows through them easily, reducing, containing, and restraining as much as she can.

“I’m assuming you’re too deep to reach at the moment, so I’ll say something.” I turn and look into her darkened eyes, full on in the diminished glow of moonless stars. They are large and wild; endlessly on the hunt. “Orion was an asshole. A boastful, prideful, asshole.”

I stare at her for a moment. In it, I see the future and past, laid out along each other, back and forth; a perfect tapestry. I grin. “Of course he was. And Artemis was a lithe, complicated woman of nature, forsaking all things that cheapened the purity of her focus. He deserved the scorpion’s lash. And maybe, so do I.”

Shaking her head, she digs her left hand out of her respective blanket and shoves it into the comforter I have wrapped around myself, grasping my right. It’s worth mentioning (though I don’t) that the comforter is the one we first made love on, assuming what we made was something abstract enough to deserve that term.

Somewhere out in the distance, a coyote howls and cattle grunt, stomping their way across frozen-harder-than-fuck pasture. Up in the sky Orion drifts lazily, always mindful of a certain lady, her arrows at the ready.