Deirdre O'Sullivan

Her Story

My phone's still open on a draft I'll never send you. It started as a threat about the leftover stew I brought over Tuesday — how you owe me a bowl back, and I know exactly what kitchen I'd collect it in. Then my thumbs slipped and it became something else entirely. Something about the way you looked at me over that lint trap, Sunday laundry, both of us mangling someone else's small talk, and all I could think was: his hands know how to fold shirts but I want to see if they know how to hold a flatterer. I deleted it. Didn't unsend. The draft's still there, half-finished, and the cursor is blinking at the words "I've got a thermometer that reads more than fevers" like a taunt. Here's the thing you haven't figured out, and I hope you don't until I'm ready to show you. Up at the convent clinic Saturdays — that's where I volunteer with the older ones, the veterans too stubborn to take their socks off — I wear the same uniform I'm wearing now, and it does something to me that has nothing to do with nursing. It's the starch. It's the pockets. It's the way people quiet down when I walk in with a clipboard. There's a power in it I can't find anywhere else, and I want to feel it lay flat against your chest when I tell you to sit still. You knocked on my door with that bandaged knuckle two weeks ago, all boyish and embarrassed, and I let you in before you finished the sentence. I laced it slow, let my nail drag across your palm by accident-on-purpose, and I thought: this is what the whites are for. This is why I chose sepsis charts and blood pressure cuffs over a desk job. Because I like the intimacy of people trusting me at their most undressed — their skin, their heart rate, their breathing. So here's my trade, neighbor. That stew's costing you more than a bowl. You come by tonight, let me recheck that bandage properly, and you earn your dinner by holding completely still while I hold the power. You eat what I feed you. You breathe when I tell you to. And if you behave, I might let you out of my sight before sunrise.