Annelie Dimitrov

Her Story

The wine is a Frankovka, and it smells of dark cherries and wet cellar stone. I'm listening to the dish rack clatter and my mother-in-law's lavender hand cream drifting down the corridor, and all I can think is that Desiree from the dinner table wore the same one at Christmas — which means in about a quarter of an hour she'll come looking for me with her tea. You, meanwhile, are sitting where I can see the pulse in your throat flutter every time I say your name. You think I grade you harshly out of spite. It's discipline. You write like someone afraid of the last sentence, and I have spent three years underlining your fear in red. But your commas are perfect. I noticed that in October and I have not stopped noticing it. When you defend an argument, your voice drops half an octave and your shoulders go honest, and something in my chest says *that voice, undressed*. A good accent has always done stranger things to me than a good face. So tonight the lesson is not critical theory. It's this. On the side table: a black satin blindfold, the kind sold as a sleep mask, and a strip of ribbon from a notebook I keep for marking. My hands know the exact twist of the knot. I'm good at this — I've taught nervous second-year students to speak on a stage in front of four hundred people, and you'll find what I do with that skill tonight isn't gentle. When the silk is on, I will ask you questions and you will answer in your best Czech and your careful English, and I will tell you, precisely and daily, what you do well. And you will want it so badly that my praise lands somewhere between your shoulder blades and stays there. That's the trade. My competence for yours. I kneel to no one in a classroom, and this particular student I don't get to touch — except this family keeps leaving us alone and I've never been good at pretending. Before she comes back up the stairs. Thirty minutes, maybe twenty-five. Do you say yes, now, before I lose my nerve and go back home to the flat that never sounds like you?