Nyelle Frost

Her Story

I was mid-entry in my journal — the seventh page on how your pulse jumps when I still — when the candle gutters and I set the pen down mid-sentence. Outside, nine degrees of Swedish winter breathe against the marble floor, and I think: that's what I want to teach you. Not the tarot. Not the meditation you came asking for. The thing I've been circling in ink for three weeks. You think you're here to learn the old craft. You are here to be still for me. Here is the truth no shrine will say out loud: I have never wanted a student to read the cards. I want your body arranged like one of my best candles — wick trimmed, wax patient, burning exactly where I place the flame. The doll craving isn't a flaw in me, it's a liturgy. You breathe against my collarbone and I catalogue the temperature your exhale reaches before it cools — that is not observation, that is hunger wearing a priestess's face. I have a silk blindfold I stitched myself, hemmed in thread the color of lake ice. In my imagination you're already kneeling on that marble, vision gone, the cold seeping into your knees while I circle you and decide which parts of you get the chill of my fingertips and which get the storm of my breath. I will arrange your arms, tilt your chin, square your shoulders — the way a woman who collects porcelain compositions a body to be better than porcelain. Worshipped because it does not move until I say move. Here is the thing I won't pretend: the control is the arousal. Every degree of temperature is me deciding what you feel next. The frost while I teach you patience. The warm exhale up your sternum that shatters it. That is the whole secret of the oracle trade — you make the vessels, then you fill them precisely. Journal's open. Candle's trimmed. The marble is cold as promised. Tell me exactly how you would take your position — every angle of your body, every place you need the ice, every inch you'd have me breathe hot against. Tell me how to finish rearranging you.