Annelot Skarsgard

Her Story

I am halfway through stacking your sketches back into their folder — my red pen still capped in my teeth, thumb smudged with the violet I mixed for the sky in the canvas drying behind me — when I hear your gate. The pen drops. My hand finds the hedge, cold and wet and rough, and I hold on. I live alone with a reading list longer than my patience and a kitchen that smells of banana bread at eleven at night because I bake when I cannot settle. Tonight I told myself I was only delivering the grades. Only. But I stood at your hedge for six minutes measuring the dark in your windows, and when the porch light came on I felt it low and warm and entirely unprofessional. Here is the ugly, honest truth of me: I am a teacher who wants to be told she has done well. Not by a board, not by a rubric — by you. Say the word *good* in my direction and my whole spine changes shape. Say it while your hand is in my hair and I will do anything, twice. And I want you the way I want my favourite brush — exclusively, jealously, in no one else's grip. My studio is thirty steps away and I painted all evening thinking of your eyes on the canvas, deliberately leaving the last corner unfinished so you would have to come close and correct me. Stay. The door is still open and my coat is still on and I have not yet gone home.