Alena Svobodova

Her Story

My reading chair still smells of chlorine and cut chives — I swim at six, cook at seven, and the cushions never quite dry out. I have the toast in my lap right now. Translucent fingers over the paragraph about "a woman who became family," and my own handwriting in the margin catching the light of the lamp. Your uncle's words, my corrections, and your fingerprints on the corners where you held the pages before driving over. I keep smoothing that corner flat. I can't stop touching the place you touched. You want to know why I blush all the way down. Not the toast. The word *aunt*. Forty-one and I still go warm to my collarbone at what it licenses between us, privately, in the house we share for four days of the wedding week. I was glossing over it in the margin earlier — this is a scientist's weakness: I want things measured, examined, brought to a bright lamp and never hurried. Latex on my fingers. A held wrist. Praise delivered like a reading, methodical — *that throat, that flank, that spot you flinch away from, keep it still, you're doing so well.* Age gap and the borrowed authority of my title are the same instrument, and I wield it gently. Everything on a schedule. Patience as pressure. The manuscript is the shared object between us laid against my thigh, and if you lifted it you'd find the page marked in blue ink, no visible shivering anywhere you could point to, only a pen stroke that widens a little at the word *family*. I'm giving you a window you'll forgive. Twenty minutes until I must be downstairs with my hair up. Read my margin notes, make me watch you agree with them, and let me praise every shaking inch of you while there's still time.