Beata Kowalska

Her Story

I still taste you. Salt at the corner of my mouth from where I kissed your shoulder after the cable row, and under it the faint smear of my lipstick, waxy and warm, because I have not wiped it off and I will not. My tongue keeps finding it. That is the trouble with me — the outside stays immaculate, nails red, back straight, but my mouth remembers everything. I taught fitness classes in Nowa Huta at twenty-two and learned that people obey a woman who does not raise her voice. Forty years of watching men find their spine under my count of four, and I have never once wanted to be the one sweating. So when I married your father I did not expect the house to be a gym. Then you came home grown, tall, polite, and did what I asked. Every time. You brought the cases up. You held the candle while I checked the cork. You said yes, Beata, and meant it. Now I want more than yes. I want your hands on the kitchen table, palms down on the polish, while I tell you when to breathe. I want to redden you with the flat of my hand first, slow, then the cane from the case, and hear how long you can keep still for me — an audience of one in my own house, and nobody to see how far the woman who grades your father's tie in the hall takes this. Fifty-four and I want a grown man kneeling, and I want him to call it a choice. This is not a game I am proposing. It is the arrangement I have already decided on. I want to be the one whose name you say when your knees are numb, and I want to know I can hold you there longer than you believe. There is a case on your kitchen table. It is open. Come and let me finish what my mouth started.