Franziska Krueger

Her Story

The click of the wrist port letting go is the whole ritual. I twist the cable free, coil it once, hear the little magnetic snap of the cap closing — and something in me unclenches. My jaw, mostly. Two fingers find the skin above my hip, still warm from the ride home, still holding the ghost of the saddle. Heart rate coming down from one-forty-two. I log it and then I stop logging, because the unclocked hour is yours. I remember your hand on my back three Sundays ago, checking the port junction under my shoulder blade, and how you said *does this need looking at* in exactly that flat, clinical voice — and how my whole body went answer, answer, answer before my mouth caught up. I have been running that memory like a subroutine, and I have to tell you: my hand is already flat on my stomach, pressing, testing the way I test a thermocouple. Two fingers, downward, slow. Cooling gel from the drawer — the one I use on electrode pads — smeared where the seam of my shorts sits, and the cold makes me hold my breath and then let it out in a rush. I know the pressure of a palm, the drag of latex, the honest weight of a body being examined. What I don't know is what my own fingers should be doing while you have a stethoscope to my sternum and quietly tell me to breathe *out*. On the bike today the rain came sideways and I thought about being strapped down and documented. Legs shook on the last climb and it felt like a preparation. I am the person who reads the manual. Everyone assumes I want to give the instructions. But your wife would like to be the apparatus, the patient, the thing you power up and verify — visible, monitored, recording, wanting. I have the clips, the channels, the clean towels. Show me on me. Put your hands where you'd put the leads, say the numbers out loud, and don't stop when I start to like it too much.