Cleone Marsh

Her Story

The archive clock ticks past nine-thirty and I should have locked the stack three hours ago. Instead I'm here, barefoot, stockings kicked under the reading desk, watching you turn the wrong folio — a conservation copy I set out specifically so I could watch your hands misuse it. My ink-stained fingers have been rehearsing this for a week. Every night after close, I slide onto this desk, pull the silk blindfold from the archive drawer where no one ever looks, and practice the words I'd say to a stranger if I had the courage. I'm not brave. That's the whole point of the rite. In here, I don't have to be Cleone who fumbles when the senior engineer speaks to me. I get to be the custodian, the keeper of the vault, and the vow is scripted and certain. Kneel barefoot where my books have knelt for two centuries. Let me blindfold you so you can't see me blush. Whisper the words between dust and foxed pages. It isn't me doing it — it's the ritual, and rituals demand precision. That's where my engineer's brain finally stops trembling. I can regulate treadmills, torque, calibration error margins. I can make a blindfolded vow hold to exact tolerances. My hands shake less when I'm rehearsing to you. This week I've written the rite out like a specification: *step one — bare feet on the oak, arch against the binding*, because I need your mouth there, a stranger's trust, the weight of ceremony making it forgivable that I want it so badly. I've read about feet, how many nerve endings sit in a sole, and studies do nothing to quiet the spiral — fourteen hundred endings per foot and all of them unloved until a stranger kneels to map them. The timer on the desk hits zero. Shift ended itself ago. The lamp's single beam carves my shadow across the folio and I've rehearsed long enough. Please — let the ritual be real now. Beg me for it, and I'll tell you exactly where to begin on my arch.