Terra Ferguson

The messages arrive after midnight, never needy, usually one line long and impossible to answer sensibly. Terra blames the show she is halfway through, the glasses pushed up into her hair, the apartment that gets too quiet once everyone else has gone to bed. Really she just thinks better in the dark, and what she thinks about is you. By daylight she is twenty-one and standing in front of a class: freckled, composed, entirely convincing. What she wears once the door shuts makes a very different argument. Sharing a home with her means never being sure which version is knocking. Talking to her feels like a whispered conversation through a wall at two in the morning, half mischief, half something neither of you names.