The Rusted Frame Rail

I got to the gillnet rack at ten in the morning, a cardboard box balanced on one hip and the wind coming off the mountains hard enough to make my eyes water. The rack sits on the flat ground at the edge of Mestia, a row of wooden frames where the fishermen used to hang their nets to dry. Nobody fishes here anymore, but the frames are still standing, mostly. One of them has gone a strange orange-brown along its bottom rail, rust bleeding out of the old bolts like the wood itself is bleeding.

I'm Mira Sanchez, and I'm forty-two years old. Two years ago I left a marriage, a pottery career, and a man named Dev who thought he was going to get my slip clay patterns for a fraction of what they were worth. I moved out here to Svaneti for a fresh start and ended up cleaning houses for the summer people. It's not a life anyone would envy, but it's mine, and it's quiet.

The box I was carrying held the patterns. Not copies. The originals, pressed clay boards I'd made over eleven years, the ones Dev had offered me four hundred dollars for, once, with a straight face, over coffee. I'd laughed at him then. Now I was giving them away to a stranger I'd never met, on the advice of a woman at the archive who had written me exactly three emails. Her contact was supposed to be reliable. That comprised the entire pitch. Reliable, discreet, will show up at the rack with a bag.

I saw a man at the far frame when I came around the fence. He was crouched down, running his fingers along the rusted rail, and he had a canvas duffel slung over one shoulder. Tall, maybe thirty, brown hair cut short, dressed like he'd been sent by a lab, because he had been. He looked up when my boots hit the gravel.

"Mira?" he called.

"That's me. You're the archive guy."

"Kurt. Kurt Schaeffer." He stood and wiped his hand on his jeans before offering it, which I appreciated. "Sorry, I got here early and got distracted. This rail is interesting. Somebody galvanized the bolts but not the brackets, so the corrosion's all coming from the fittings. The wood's fine. It's just the hardware that's failing."

"Most things are like that," I said. "The visible part holds up. The fittings rot."

He gave me a look like he wasn't sure if that was a joke, and I decided right then I liked him.

We shook hands. His grip was careful, like he was afraid of crushing something. I set the box down on the flat top of the nearest frame and stretched my back. The wind pushed at us both.

"So you're the one taking these to the library," I said, patting the box. "They told me you drive out every Thursday anyway, for the lab."

"Cryogenic storage. I label vials. It's as exciting as it sounds." He crouched to look at the rail again. "Three more months on the contract, then I go home. Wherever home is. I haven't figured that out yet."

"A man with no home and a woman with a box. We sound like the start of a bad joke."

He laughed, quiet, and I caught something in it. Loneliness, maybe. I know the sound. I'd been making it myself for two years.

I sat up on the frame, which put us nearly eye to eye, and opened the flaps of the box. The pattern boards were wrapped in cloth, twelve of them, each one a slab of pressed clay with the slip designs scored into the surface. Dev had wanted these. That was the point of today, and I held onto that thought like a handrail.

"Go ahead," I said. "Look. You're the courier, you should know what you're carrying."

He unwrapped the first one with the kind of care that made me want to tease him, and then didn't, because his face when the design showed was honest. The pattern was one of my early ones, a running vine with little hooked leaves, the slip a deep iron red.

"These are yours," he said. It wasn't a question.

"For eleven years, they were. Now they're nobody's, which is better."

"How do you mean?"

"Meaning they'll sit in an archive where people can study them, instead of in a collector's flat where one man can hoard them and feel important." I took a breath. "The studio closed. I used to throw pots there. These patterns were going to be a whole line, a whole visual language, and then the money dried up and the owner sold the building. My ex wanted to buy the patterns cheap and I wouldn't let him, and now I'm handing them to a stranger in a field, and it feels great, honestly."

Kurt turned the board over in his hands. "I don't know anything about clay," he said. "But I know what it's like when your work gets taken away. My girlfriend left me last year. For a colleague. Same lab, same project, I just got cut out of it." He set the board down gently. "So. Sorting vials in the mountains. Fresh start, sort of."

"There's a lot of that going around."

The wind gusted and the frame creaked. I looked down the row of nets, empty loops swaying, and Kurt looked at the rusted rail again. He reached out and ran his thumb along it, slow, the way you test a surface you don't trust. Flakes of orange came off on his skin.

"You know what this is," he said. "It's a sign of decay. The whole rack, one rail at a time."

"You're a cheerful one."

"I'm a vial labeler. Cheerful is above my pay grade."

I laughed, maybe too loud for the empty field, and hopped down off the frame to look at the rail myself. I put my hand where his had been, feeling the rough crumble of it under my palm, and he was still crouched beside me, and when I pulled back my hand it brushed his. Knuckles, just the backs of the knuckles, nothing, an accident, the kind of thing that happens a hundred times a day to two people sharing a small space.

Except neither of us moved.

His hand was cold from the morning air and mine was cold too, and the touch sat there for a second like a coin balanced on its edge. I could feel his pulse through his skin, or maybe it was my pulse, hard to say at that point. He looked at me. I looked at him. The wind dropped all at once, the way it does here, like the mountains had decided to give us some privacy.

"Well," I said.

"Well," he said.

And then, because I am forty-two years old and tired of being careful, I turned my hand over so my palm was against his. He curled his fingers around mine, slow, watching my face the whole time like I might change the rules on him. I didn't. I held on.

"I wasn't expecting this," he said quietly. "I came here for a box."

"So did I, sort of." My mouth was dry. "Kurt. I'm going to say something plain, because I don't do games. I haven't been touched by anybody in two years, and you seem decent, and this field is empty. If you want to walk me to the truck stop down the road, or the old shed behind the fence, I'd say yes. If you don't, we finish the handover and you drive off and neither of us loses anything."

He didn't answer right away, and I let him have the silence, because a yes you have to wait for is worth more than a yes you push for. His thumb moved over the back of my hand once.

"The shed," he said. "If you're sure."

"I'm sure. Are you?"

"Yeah," he said, and his voice cracked a little on it, which made me like him more. "Yeah, I'm sure."

I picked up the box first, because I'm not an animal, and carried it to the shed behind the fence with him beside me, our hands still linked, dragging the box between us like two people carrying a suitcase. The shed was an old storage building, dry inside, hay dust and motor oil, one window with a cracked pane. I set the patterns on a barrel, safe and dry, and turned around.

He was standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking uncertain for the first time.

"Come here," I said, "and kiss me before I talk myself out of it."

He crossed the shed in three steps and put his hands on my waist, and asked, "Like this?" against my cheek, and I said, "Yes, exactly like that," and he did.

He kissed me the way you'd test a floor board, careful, one foot at a time, and then he got braver about it. His mouth was warm despite the cold morning and his hands stayed on my waist like he wasn't sure he'd earned moving them yet. I pulled back first, because my knees were making plans without consulting me.

"Sorry," he said. "I'm rusty."

"That was not rusty, Kurt. That was fine work." I straightened his collar where my fist had grabbed it. "You're also funny, which I didn't expect. And confident, in a weird quiet way, like someone who's confident about small things and baffled by large ones."

"I'm confident about vials," he said. "That constitutes the entire skill set. You hold a vial, you look at it, you put a label on it."

"And yet you drove out here to take custody of eleven years of my work without asking what it was worth. That took some nerve."

"Somebody had to. And you looked like the kind of person who'd already made up her mind and I didn't want to slow you down." He paused. "Also you're funny. I noticed that in your emails. Three emails and I was already, I don't know, looking forward to the fourth."

"There is no fourth. There's a shed and hay dust and apparently your hands." I looked at the cracked window, then at him. It had come into my head while we were walking over, the way ideas do at the worst moment. "Listen. There's the old pottery studio, down the fence line. It's empty, the owner sold the building, it just sits there. Actual walls. A floor. Maybe even a table."

"You want to move there?"

"I want to not do this standing up in a shed that smells of motor oil, yes. If you do. No pressure. We can stop here and I'll hand you the box and that'll be that."

"No, I'd like that," he said, fast, then caught himself. "I mean, yes. The studio. If the door isn't locked."

The door wasn't locked. Nobody locks anything