The Measures Between Us by Ethan Hauser

stockinged feet up onto the edge of the coffee table. At her home, Jack did the same, and many nights he stayed long past midnight. Often they rented movies, and occasionally one or both of them would fall asleep before the end. It was nice to wake up next to her, the production credits scrolling by in the dark room. In the blur of just waking up, he always watched for the best boy and the key grip; it was a joke between the two of them, these oddly labeled jobs, and no movie was ever officially over until they knew the names.
    He circled her block three times. All the recent rain had turned everything so green it looked almost artificial. Everyone was nervously monitoring the river levels. He knew the neighborhood so well, yet the houses seemed strange, the trees and signs unfamiliar, as if he had driven for hundreds of miles instead of ten minutes. A green Ford passed him. It looked like Cynthia’s father’s car, and Jack tailed it for a few minutes until he realized it was a different model. He could pull over, or find the interstate, floor the gas pedal and in half an hour be in farm country,see sheep graze by moonlight and stars float over mountaintops. The world was different out there. There was a dairy farmer, a widower, who carved his cornfield into a labyrinth every Halloween. It got more and more elaborate each year, with robotic scarecrows, mechanical bats, hidden trapdoors. Speakers buried in the ground played sound effects when you stepped on mines. He welded a massive ship’s ladder to one of his silos, and he climbed up there alone with a flask of whiskey and watched everyone get lost and scared. He had binoculars so he could see their faces. He watched the first child enter and the last one emerge, and the next year he did it all again.

Chapter Four
    In high school Cynthia liked to get stoned, something Jack learned after a pep rally when she and her friends invited him out on a ritual they would end up repeating on many weekends. They’d pile into a car and drive out to an isolated creek or river and idle away an afternoon, drinking and getting wasted. They would play a new CD over and over and mangle the lyrics and dance once they were high enough to shed their self-consciousness. To cool down, they found the deepest spots of the water and dove under.
    They scoured the shoreline for flat rocks to skip, and Cynthia asked Jack to teach her how to throw the stones. He told her you had to keep it low and that it was all in the angle of the wrist. Three or four jumps were the most she could get, and then she would give up and splash into the water and frog-kick down to the bottom. Jack watched her disappear: first her head, then her shoulders, her back and legs. Then, finally, her feet, and for ten or twenty seconds she was no more than an afterimage. She would come up in a different spot, breaking the water’s surface with her hair slicked to her head, her T-shirt pasted to her skin.
    Sometimes he worried he was staring too much, that the others—and especially Cynthia—would notice his watching andsay something, turn him small with embarrassment. Or, worse, she would pull away. But everyone was too drunk or too high to care, or too wrapped up in their own fearsome, insatiable longing.
    Gradually they separated themselves. They would take walks deep into the woods, finding old logging roads, hidden brooks, and noisy waterfalls, and when they returned there were insinuating smirks from everyone else, even though nothing had happened. More often they had simply ventured through the trees, slapping away low-hanging branches and crunching twigs underfoot. Chipmunks and squirrels darted across their path, and they might see deer. “Let’s lie down,” Cynthia said once, spotting three of the animals. “Let’s see how close they’ll come.” Jack lay next to her, trying to remain as still as possible. “How long?” he whispered. She squeezed his wrist and