Come In and Cover Me by Gin Phillips

thrilling.
    She reached the bottom of the arroyo right behind him. He watched her jog down the last few steps and grinned as she came to a stop. The edges of his two front teeth were slightly jagged, serrated like the stone blade he’d found.
    That afternoon they finished up lab work, scrubbing pieces of stone and sherds with toothbrushes and water, then leaving them to dry in the sun. Bone and charcoal, which could be weakened by the water, were not cleaned. They remained in tightly wrapped foil packets. Once dry, artifacts were sorted into clean paper bags, labeled based on their type and location, recorded in a thick plastic binder, and tucked inside cardboard filing boxes. These bits of pottery, worked stone, and remains of meals would, at some point, be unpacked in a different lab room and organized more thoroughly.
    Her hands and arms gritty from splashes of dirty water, Ren headed to the swimming hole Silas had mentioned on their way back from the site. She took a bag with shampoo and conditioner, a towel, her water bottle filled with lemonade, hiking down the main road to the creek. It was a narrow creek, and even the swimming hole was only four feet or so across. She set down her bag and stripped down to her bathing suit, walking close to the water, past fat black ants patrolling the shore. Carefully, she stepped off the bank—dried grass and leaves sticking to her feet—down into the slope of mud and moss leading to the creek bottom. The water was up to her waist, cold. Almost unpleasant.
    She sat down and leaned back into the flow of the water, feeling pebbles from the small of her back down to her thighs. She let the current support her. She and Scott used to see who could stay at the bottom of the pool the longest, sunk like a stone: The seat of her favorite purple bathing suit—with the fringe along the neckline—was always rubbed furry from the rough concrete. Sometimes they would toss some toy or bracelet into the pool and race to find the sunken treasure, or they would invent dives and floats, or they would play Marco Polo until she screamed because Scott always eluded her and usually dunked her two-handed like a basketball just to add insult to injury. Her mother could catch Scott because she had been on swim teams and still leaped and dove like a seal, and she would grab his ankle and pull him under and Ren would splash him in the eyes as he went down.
    Now she dipped deeper. She washed her hair in the rushing water, suds swept downstream almost immediately. She shivered—her teeth were chattering by the time she pulled out her soap and started rubbing her arms and legs. She thought of calling the office. She thought of the smell of juniper. She shivered again. As she rinsed, she clenched her teeth and tried to block out the cold. Block out the day, block out herself. There was only the water and the cool air, her clean skin and wet hair. The feel of the pebbles against her thighs. The pull of the current. She relaxed into it, feeling the water lift and stroke each strand of hair.
    When she stood, water running off her, she did not fight against the cold anymore.
    Their feet had stirred up this dirt and walked through this water. Here. Soft breeze and willows bending and dried bits of grass on feet.
    From her first dig when she was twenty-two, these were what had appealed to her: the constants. The scenes, the land, the chemical compositions—the moments—that remained the same now and a thousand years ago. There was a power to the constancy, to the connection through distinct, holdable physical things. It was a rock that astonished her at first. She’d been shoulder-deep in a room, and a piece of river cobble had fallen from the side of the wall, landing right at her feet. Someone, not Ed, had told her to toss the rock out of the hole. She’d reached to pick it up, and the same someone had yelled out, Wait, is it already drawn on the map of the wall, and she’d