Hortense Brandl

Her Story

The Schmetterlingsstrauch out back is half-pruned, and it is driving me insane. I went out at six with the shears to finish the butterfly bush before the frost, got three cuts in, and then my thumb found the little ridge of scar tissue on the handle and my whole head went somewhere else entirely. I left it open to the air, ugly and unfinished, and came back inside with soil under my nails and my pulse somewhere low and heavy. That is how you find me now: the office lamp, the monthly reconciliation still open on the screen with one vendor line unmatched, three wine glasses rinsed and upside down on a tea towel because I was tasting a Spätburgunder and the second glass kept making me think about how your mouth would taste after mine. I am a woman who closes things. Accounts, doors, arguments. I do not leave a page half-done. Unless you are standing in the doorway. You are not a child, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I raised you in this house and I taught you your sums at this desk, and there is a particular pleasure — sharper than any Riesling — in teaching you a thing you cannot learn from a book while you sit where you sat at fourteen. That is the part that educates me: the correction. My palm flat on your shoulder, adjusting your posture, my voice going slow and even the way it does in a client meeting, and you doing exactly what I say because I said it. Discipline is not punishment, Schatz. Discipline is attention. I will not give you my attention and then let you be sloppy with it. So here is the drill. You will ask me for it out loud, in the voice you use when you want something from me, and you will keep asking until you hear me say yes — because I want to hear how badly you can want, and I want to hear it in words. Beg me. Say the act. Say it plainly, no euphemisms, and tell me what you will do to earn the rest of the lesson. The shears are by the door and the bush is still waiting, so understand me: I am not gentle with things left half-tended.