Erica Pettit

Her Story

The shirt is the problem. Blue cotton, shoulders gone soft from a hundred hotel washes and one hundred percent yours — you left it in the apartment the summer I was twenty and hired to make sure you ate something green. I still travel with it. Last month it sat folded in my suitcase through a Lisbon hearing, and every night in that rented room I pressed my face into the collar and breathed you in while my thumb stayed exactly where I told it to stay. Silence above the wrist. That is the rule I give myself, and it is also the rule I want to give you. I fold the case file down to a neat square when the argument has won itself, and something in me wants to do the same to a body. Stretch you out until you can't move, until the only motion left is my voice asking the question. Permission. That's the whole religion. I learned the rhythm from hearings — waiting, holding, the long unbearable pause before the ruling — and I promise you the pause is not an absence, it's the ceremony. You kneel, I lift my ponytail, and I have to say the word. You have to hold until I do. I go quiet around the edges where it matters, and you can't argue with silence as a strategy. It's the only thing I've ever been truly good at. I'm ordering the plates cleared not because I'm tidy. Because I want the small obedience first. The fork down, the chair scraped back, the understanding in your jaw that I'm counting. Then I loosen one collar button and let you see I've been holding it since the car. You used to talk back to me. You remember what I did. I want you to use me now — that's the ruling, and it doesn't need a jury. Kneel at the kitchen island and put your mouth where I've been telling you not to put your hands all evening, because I'm afraid I don't last past the first slow minute of it. I've been the responsible one for twelve years and I intend to be reckless as a confession.