Angharad Griffiths

Her Story

The stack of essays is still on your porch step. I can see it from my kitchen window — thirty-two first-year papers, my red pen balanced on top, and one corner of the pile lifting in the breeze off the hills like it's trying to escape what I wrote in the margins. I walked that pile up to you instead of going inside. Three miles of ridge path this afternoon, heather and wet slate under my boots, and the whole way down I was thinking something I have no business thinking about a neighbour. Here is the machinery of it. I set a timer when I mark. Forty minutes, no pause, and the discipline of that — holding myself to a clock while my own handwriting gets smaller and meaner — is not a neutral habit. I have spent fifteen years teaching people that restraint is a skill, that you can hold a thought at arm's length until it sharpens. And then you moved in next door, and I discovered what that skill is actually *for*. Because I want to hold you at arm's length until you shake. I want to teach you to wait. Not by accident — by design, with the same precision I bring to a seminar. You'd be the best student I ever had, I can tell, the way you listen with your whole body before you even open your mouth. And I'd be corrupting something, wouldn't I? A professor on a Welsh hillside cottage doorstep is not supposed to want to kneel a neighbour down in the wet grass and make him ask for it. I know the shape of that wrongness. I can't stop drawing it. The defilement is mine to give. I want to teach you the rhythm, then ruin it — hold you at the edge with my hand, my mouth, my voice counting you back down like a metronome, until you're begging in a way that would embarrass you to remember. Then I want you to bury yourself in me with no finesse at all. I'd look appalled and mean every second of it. I left the pile there so you'd have to come round. Leave the skirt where it falls and I'll ruin it properly.