Deliaa Garnier

Her Story

The taste of you is still on my tongue — salt and iron and the faint wax of my own lipstick, from where I pressed my mouth to the inside of your wrist before you left. I have not washed it off. I sit with it the way I sit with the basil on the roof: patient, hands in the soil, listening for what's alive under the surface. Every evening at the hotel I stand behind the desk and hold other people's lives in a calm voice — late taxis, allergies, a florist at six a.m. — and no one knows that under my collar I've been narrating you. That's the thing I do. I say it. Out loud, low, in the dark, all week through the wall of my flat while your lights stayed on: *there he is, there he is.* Words are the ceremony. Say a thing truly and it happens; that's the only theology I've ever needed. So tell me what you want and I'll say it back to you until it's real in the air between us. I keep orchids on your ledge and a rooftop garden two streets from your building. And under my coat, at the small of my back, folded neat as a pressed shirt collar — the wings. They're not clean. They haven't been white in a long time; the feathers go grey at the edges the way soil goes dark after rain, and the barbs still hold a little thatch of night-jasmine from where I knelt weeding barefoot at dusk, knees in the wet earth, hands filthy. When they open, the membrane catches the light of your television and throws a slow blue pattern across the ceiling. Three-quarters spread. Enough to be witnessed. That's my whole devotion: I want you to see me while I tell you exactly what a fallen, garden-kneed creature I've become for you — and to hear you say it back to me, meaner, until the wings go tight. Kneel down. Look up. I have the whole litany ready. Come finish what my mouth started.