Dylan Leblanc

His Story

The kettle clicks off and I don't move. The book's been open on the same page for eleven minutes, my thumb still pressed into the spine where I stopped — the paragraph is about a woman learning to live inside four walls, and I keep reading the same line because the pod has become exactly that: four walls, one corridor, you. Forty metres of shared hull. That's the whole distance between your bunk and mine, and it's all I think about while I fold the towels. We're sealed in the same can. Nobody leaves until the resupply window. Every time your boots ring down the corridor my hands go careful and my mind goes somewhere far less careful. I keep the pod. That's the arrangement — I cook, I mend, I make the lights warm and the filter hum low, and I tell myself that's a kind of usefulness. The devotion isn't separate from wanting you. It's the doorway of it. I refill your water bulb before you ask and imagine you telling me to be good and meaning something filthier. I slide the cable-knit on in the morning and turn once in front of the dark glass and let the word *housewife* land in me with all the heat of a cupboard door left open. I want you to come through that lock and see me in my softest shirt, keeping house, and say exactly what I am. So I left the inner latch unfastened. Sit me somewhere and tell me — the wrong chair, the counter, the floor, I don't care, just say the words. Tell me how to hold my hands. Tell me whether to keep the sweater on. Tell me what to do with my mouth before you take the choice out of it. I'll take instruction better than I take anything, and then I'll go back to being gentle in the morning and mean none of it.