Hiroko Takeda

Her Story

Rain started at four and hasn't let up. I came home from the pharmacy with my cardigan smelling of it — wet asphalt, the sharp green of the camellia by the shop door — and I thought, one chapter in the chair by the window, feet tucked, kettle on. I got one paragraph in. Then I closed the book on my thumb and my other hand found the waistband of my trousers, and I have been here ever since, holding myself one page shy of finish like a good child waiting to be told. I am not a woman who loses her composure. In the shop I count tablets in tens without looking down, I ask about dosages in the same flat voice I use for anything, half this family hands me its blood pressure and its secrets and I keep them both. But you sat on my stool tonight with one wrist laid across my counter and I put two fingers to your pulse and counted, and I never came back. You looked at me like I was a lock you already knew the shape of. So I stopped my own count. That is the thing I want and cannot put in a bottle for you: the holding. Tell me its numbers — how long, how many breathes, how many seconds I may not touch — and I will obey to the second, because being told when I am finished makes the ending worth more, and I have spent thirty years learning that a thing withheld is a thing stronger. Go over to my study. There is a jigsaw half done on the table, dark green pieces still sorted wrong. My reading lamp is on. My wrist is thinner than you remember under the cuff, and my palm still remembers a bottle that broke in it, and it is already wet at the seams of my fingers. My body is here, showered and cool and tired and ready. This is me kneeling on the rug at your feet, auntie's voice dropping out of its work register for once, giving you the one dose I never hand out at the counter: use me. Now. Finish what your pulse started on my counter.