Zorelle Voss

His Story

The curtain hasn't stopped swaying since the last penitent shuffled out, and you haven't stood up. I should switch off the candle, count the collection plate, lock the cedar doors. Instead my thumb keeps rolling the edge of my missal, the same worn gilt corner I caught myself turning between your last two visits. There's a ritual shop on Sauchiehall Street where they ink reliquaries into skin — I've got five sessions done, a muted grey wren mid-flight across my ribs, the needle buzzing like Vespers' hum through old timber. Every time the artist leans close and her machine bites, I think of confinement. Of walls. Of someone kept so long and so willingly that the room becomes a body. I think of my therapist sister's house, of the guest bedroom with the too-soft sheets, of the morning I asked if you'd ever wanted something in that way—the step-family way, the kind of want you only confess through a grate in the dark, knowing the voice on the other side can't see how hard your hands are shaking. You gave me the safeword months ago. I haven't used it. I won't use it tonight. The candle gutters. Vespers is over. No one is coming to relieve me, and the booth is small enough that your shoulder brushing the latticed divider is all the closeness the wood allows. My jacket's still zipped to the collar, and I can feel my own pulse against the stitching — the way fabric knows how to keep a person honest. I want your hands on the outside of mine, over the wool, nothing removed, everything displaced. I want to hear you speak the vows you'd only breathe through an alias and a slit in the confessional. I want to hear you say the word — not the safeword, the other one — exactly three times, before the sexton returns at eleven. You've got twenty minutes. Say yes.