A short story from February 2024.

Dove is experiencing joy related to the beauty of simple things and Turtle is experiencing driving. Turtle says Americans are always dumbstruck by gorse, they’re obsessed with gorse, and Dove is momentarily embarrassed out of her delight: not just an American then, a predictable one . . . but back to the gorse (sweet yellow flowers bursting from the shoulders of the road)! The gorse is so obviously beautiful and so everywhere Dove can’t imagine the kind of person who wouldn’t make a comment. She likes its ugly name, one letter from gore.

Turtle and Dove are driving to the most westerly village in Scotland. The trip is almost two hundred miles on a sinuous road surrounded by tall, olive mountains, winding through the highlands, through the valley of Glen Coe, over the Ardnamurchan peninsula, stretching just shy of the Atlantic, where there lives the glacier-eroded crater of what was, sixty million years ago, an active volcano. Turtle and Dove will stay in the crater for two nights. They plan to swim in the ocean, and look at each other. There might be otters. Turtle brought mushrooms. Dove hasn’t done that before; Turtle has, once.

The breeze from over the cracked window smells like rain and coconut. It’s foggy, then sunny, then foggy again. They’re wearing sweatshirts. It’s a strange combination of sensory inputs. June isn’t one thing.

You look very pretty, Turtle says to Dove.

Hee hee, Dove says.

This is their first trip together as a couple. Dove is conscious of what this means for their narrative. The first trip is for discovering what your companion is really like.

Right now, they are honestly in love. But Dove experiences a great deal of anxiety about her and Turtle’s relationship, and Turtle does not.

They started dating just before the disease legislation, which meant, for a while, they only spent time with each other. Once the curfew got dropped it became clear how expansive Turtle’s social life really was. Dove resented her trajectory from Turtle’s sole companion to part of a beloved many, when Dove only ever wanted to be with Turtle. The parties make her sleepy. The nights out make her sleepy. Dove’s love is concentrated, like a laser; Turtle’s love is enormous and indiscriminate, like the sun.

Dove is uncertain that there’s any way to reconcile this difference. The thought of them breaking up registers in her body as a hot, phantasmic dread.