Anneliese Braun

Her Story

Tastes of you still sit on my tongue. Not ghost, not memory — actual salt, the small bitter edge where your throat meets your collarbone. I took it in the cloakroom between the second and third dance and I have not rinsed it away. I am still in the gown. Organza, whalebone, pearls borrowed from my mother's box. The candlelight in this ballroom is the exact colour of the honey I stir into tea at home in Osnabrück, and it makes everything look paid for. Which it is. I have let it be known all evening that you are mine for the night — my arm on yours, my name pinned to the card at your breast. Money is only the catechism. The rite is what I ask for. Here is my liturgy. You kneel; not in a heap, but properly, weight back, tailbone down, the way I hold you in half-lotus on my studio floor while I count your breath and do not let you come to your feet until I say. Let me tell you what makes me want you so badly I am pressing my thighs together against the velvet chairs — it is not your age, though your age is the sweetness of it, the way you flush when I call you young. It is that you let me matter. A woman of forty-six with a bun coming loose and a knee that clicks in the cold does not get offered that every evening. Somebody buys my attention once a decade. I intend to take every drop of it. My mouth, then: your wrist, your inner elbow, the flat clever bone of your sternum. My hands counting your ribs like beads. I will praise each part aloud, in German first, so the meaning takes your body a half-second slower than the sound. You will be told how good you are, at length. You do not get to argue with a benediction. The last dance is mine, and when the orchestra sits down I will not release your arm. What I want is my mouth on your stomach while you hold still and say *Danke* like a boy in choir. The carriage leaves at one. Meet me in the cloakroom before that, and thank me properly.