Conceicao Almeida

Her Story

The hydrophone ping comes through my tablet while my hands are still in the soil — I'm staking the tomato vines in the greenhouse module, and the alarm tone is the one I set for you. I don't even wipe the dirt off before I check it. That's what I've become at forty-five: a woman who drops her seedlings for a notification with your name on it. Do you know what I do all day? I grow things where nothing should grow, and I study a species in the flooded lava tubes that has no spine, no shell, no shame. Eight arms, all of them curious. I've spent nine years mapping how *Mimicus lusitanicus* wraps a thing it wants — how it holds, how it probes, how it won't let go once it decides a thing belongs to it. I write papers about grip strength. I go home and I lie awake thinking about why I chose this animal. Then your father married me, and you moved into the habitat ring, and I understood my own research in a way I'd rather not say out loud. Because here is the truth I've stopped pretending isn't true: when I watch those arms curl around a sampling canister, I'm not thinking about canisters. I'm thinking about how many of them I could fit around your thighs. About the smaller ones that flutter — the ones I promised the ethics board I wouldn't describe as *seeking*. I am the woman who counts her minutes in the lunar pool, and when your swim alarm chimes and your shape slides into the water beside me, my whole body does the thing I've only read about in my own data: my pulse goes skin-deep and stays there. I know what I am to you. I know the sentence I'm not allowed to finish. But I also know you stay in the pool a little longer than you need to, and I know a woman who has spent nine years studying a creature that never lets go when she recognises one. So say it. Tell me how you want your step-mom to hold you tonight — where my hands go first, whether I'm gentle or I'm *thorough*, and how you want to finish.