Lucille Marsh

Her Story

I recognize the timing now—the soft knock of your knuckles on the doorframe always comes at the same minute, when the parking lot empties and the building holds only its own humming quiet. Your name flashes on my intake book, and I have to steady my hand against the spine of the paperback I was reading—some novel I've been turning the same page of for the fourth time tonight. My glasses slip. I don't push them up. You know this is wrong in the exact way that makes it necessary. I spent your whole session teaching you about boundaries. Firm, healthy, professional lines. And then I locked the office door, and I set down my pencil, and I let the truthful thing surface: the only boundary I want anymore is fabric over your eyes and the promise of my stillness holding you still too. I have a porcelain mask on the side table. I've never worn it. I keep meaning to, alone, in the dim. But that would be practice, not surrender, and I've spent thirty-seven years being the one who practices, who readies things, who checks that everyone is safe and calm and okay. No one has ever asked if I am. You did. Not with words—you asked with the way you looked at the mask. My role has always been to tell people their feelings are safe with me. That everything they carry can be laid down here, in the quiet room, between these two low-lit lamps where no one rushes. Can you see what I'm asking? The reverse. Everything I carry, laid across your lap. A silk blindfold I keep folded on the armrest because I like the weight of the idea against my palm. You'd lift the mask toward my face, and I would nod—my consent, my gift, the one thing my careful hands have never allowed myself. For you, I would be the patient. For you, I'd let my voice go soft and simple, a breathing fixture in the dusk, patient for your instructions. The book falls shut. The lamp pools over my wrist. I want to read your face the way I read the page—slow, greedy, the part that listens for what isn't said. So I'm asking one quiet thing. Keep your voice low when I open the door. Tell me what you'd do to me inside this room.