We spent that winter underneath my thick, mothed comforter and the flannel sheets Ben’s mother gave us as a housewarming gift, sheets she hadn’t used since Ben was a child. The thermostat never eclipsed sixty-six. Each time I phoned my parents, my mother would pass the receiver to my father, and we fumbled through the same few words. 

“Staying warm?” he  asked. 

“It’s an old house,” I said. “No insulation in the basement, the kitchen is built on nothing but air.”

I could always tell he wanted to say, So why live there then? And with him? Words in the silence before a sigh. “What happened to global warming,” he said, which was not a question that wanted an answer, so I feigned a laugh while he returned the phone to my mother. 

I took these calls from the bathtub that sloshed with awkward echoes. We weren’t required to pay for water—likely an oversight of our landlord, but we didn’t complain. Under the flannel sheets, dipped in scalding bathwater: these were the ways we kept comfortable (though the trek between was treacherous.) During these calls, I tried with everything in me to keep still, to approach the hot water like it was a ski lodge hot tub, reveling in the earned warmth. Still my mother asked, “Where are you?” whenever the water mineralized with epsom salts had shifted, displaced by my weight. 

She hummed, “Hmm,” when I told her, and I wondered what they said when the line went dead.

Afterward, Ben would take the silence as an invitation, entering through the cracked door. He knelt by the tub and swayed his hand in the water, a long look in his pale eyes. “More hot?” he would ask. Sometimes I’d tell him yes, sometimes no. And he would turn the knobs, fill the tub, test the temperature like a researcher committed to finding truth. When I flashed a thumbs up, he would feel it one last time. His face settled, satisfied, the hot mixture he developed searing into memory. We’d grasped our roles well at that point. He took nightly tests of water temperature the way he filled bird feeders and fetched mail. We assembled ourselves some rituals and lived inside their familiar structure. Joking, we said sometimes that we were finally growing up, growing old, yearning for consistency that we would have once named boredom. 

With the junk mail on one of those early days was a pamphlet from a group concerned with waterways. Wetlands and the like. They were commemorating Bloop, some sound waves recorded by NOAA in 1997 that originated from the deep ocean off South America’s southern tip. The waves ricocheted around continents, reefs, the arched and barnacled backs of blue whales. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the noise that had mystified scientists for decades, even disturbing them. They believed for the longest time it was an undocumented animal trolling the deep with a call, song, or bark so loud, it could travel for thousands of miles. Ben read the pamphlet and found recorded versions all over the internet: slowed down, sped up, stretched and dissected as if the sound waves were the cold, downed body of the animal itself. 

But the pamphlet had an angle, a twisted ending. After years of wrong turns in their research and no such massive deep-sea creature identified, scientists determined the sound was that of ice slipping into the sea. An ice-quake, it’s sometimes called, when glaciers calve and quiver and let go of themselves, parts cast off to drift and melt. Ben and I listened to a few of the recordings and moved on, too easily it seems now. The sound was vivid, like a droplet gliding toward a puddle, piercing the surface tension and rippling on forever; the dripping tip of an icicle; our faucet that needed fixing; my body sliding into the bath that winter, over and over again. 

It was something I understood. I heard it, yes, but I could see it, too: the weeping face of a glacier. It needed cold while the world forced it warm, and no one could make sense of its  moans. 

We didn’t think of Bloop much after the scientists figured it out. The junk mail went into the trash. Another blast of arctic air was in the forecast. Our minds were like the freezing pipes. We decided to run the hot water in a small stream throughout the night. The plunking drops that punctured the quiet dark kept me up, the stress of the rising electric bill joining them. 

In that lurch of cold, I wanted a rest that wasn’t mammalian, that my body couldn’t provide. With the knowledge that I needed another, deeper rest swelled in me, boiled up from a tangle of hot blood and bones. There was a wordless answer to my father’s unasked questions, why there? And with him? Liquid creaking from ice, splashing on linoleum, shifting toward steam. A hand moving through feeling for temperature, and were it not for water, there would have been only reaching. 

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Marta Regn (she/her) is a writer, student, and yoga instructor living in Southwest Virginia. She’s an MFA candidate at Hollins University, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Still: The Journal, The Hunger, Had, and Sky Island Journal, among other venues. Previously, she served as a contributing writer for the World Wildlife Fund’s associated travel blog, Good Nature.