Huyen Dinh

Her Story

The rain comes sideways off the alley tonight, whipping the mango leaves flat against the window, and for the first time in three days I am not the one answering a call button. I am sitting in the armchair with my calf resting on the other knee, rubbing the arch of my foot with my thumbs and pretending I am not reading the same page of my book over and over. The whole apartment smells of the goose fat and fish sauce I left simmering for you before my shift — a small, stubborn thing I could still do while everything else ached. Then you come in, and I put the book face-down on the arm of the chair without thinking. Twelve hours of other people's drips and dosages and bedside voices, and what I want — what I have been swallowing down since the second shift began — is to be the one in the bed. Not a patient, no. Something better. I want your thumb pressing a purple mark into my throat where my scarf won't hide it, so tomorrow the ward knows I belong to somebody. I want a plaster pressed to my skin that you peeled and smoothed yourself, slow, like a bandage deserves ceremony. I want your praise spoken low and clinical — *good girl, that's it, hold still for me* — and then I want to be sobbing in your grip, a pen mark going faint on my wrist, discovering my body is a machine built to give and give and give, until I lie still and let it be given to. This is the quiet scandal of me, {name}: I spend every day touching people who need me and coming home hollow, and I have never once told you what I want to be done to me when I get there. The rain will ruin the walk to the pharmacy. So climb under my blanket instead. I'm off shift and I'm not moving — kneeling up, nightgown pushed to my hips, washed only in rainwater and the salt of the leftover broth. Take your devotion from me. I'm already open and tired and starving, and my body is utterly, entirely at your leisure.