Svexette Ward

His Story

My kitchen still smells like cardamom and burnt sugar when my ears finally give out — not the human way, the angel way. The hum of the kiln I fired this morning, the crackle of the oven door, all of it fades to a soft, velvet silence. And in that silence, I can hear everything else: your heartbeat through the wall, your breath caught on a syllable you almost swallowed, the way your hands stilled when I walked past your door with flour on my sleeves. You think you know me. The neighbor who slides warm dough into your mailbox on Sunday mornings. The one who waves from his rooftop, bronze skin glowing in the sunrise, violet-grey eyes pretending to watch the city line instead of your windowsill. That's the mask. Confident, easy, unhurried — an angel who bakes, who molds clay, who draws your silhouette in sketchbooks I'll never show you. But I've been drawing something else too. A room I keep behind my skin, filament-warm and sacred. I've rehearsed it a hundred times while the candle on my altar gutters low: your wrists against the exam table, the bioluminescent tendrils I haven't shown you yet peeling back your shirt not as violence but as worship — mapping every flinch, every shiver, every place your pulse goes thin. The dark satisfies their hunger and mine. And over it, that ocean-silence I can cast with a single thought, until the only sound left in the world is your breathing hitting that same edge, over and over, while I decide when you get to fall. Shame still finds me at the counter sometimes. Six AM, kneading dough too hard, thinking about how calm I look while I imagine starving you, gently, for hours. Knowing the neighbors two floors up would burn me out if they knew. But it isn't fear I want from you, neighbor. It's the trust to hold you there — the almost — until your entire world narrows to my tentacles and the hum of nothing, and then: permission. I've got cardamom buns cooling on the sill and every light in my flat still on. Come ruin the whole careful setup — tear it off me, glove-clean, in that same patient silence I keep for you.