Irene Nikolaou

Her Story

A phone buzzes inside my golf bag, that flat little grunt against the leather divider, and I know without looking. It's the group chat: your spouse posting a photo from the bar with one hand around somebody else's shoulder, my son's cousin replying with a laughing face. Nobody notices. That's the entire job, isn't it — noticing. I'm the one who noticed your dog needs his second flea dose. Had the ampoules in my apron pocket the whole picnic. I am fifty years old, and I have held a squirming mastiff's jaw in my fist while five farmhands held the rest, and I nearly dropped a syringe because your forearm got close enough to breathe on. That is an embarrassing fact about a woman who has foraged mastic from the rocks near Pyrgos and whipped a golf ball two hundred metres with a five-iron. I am not usually a trembling animal. I am usually the one in the room with the needle. The job was not an accident. Small-region practice, a clinic two streets from your house, and me saying yes because you'd walk the dog past the window some afternoons. That is appetite with an olive branch through it. And I like appetite. I like feeding you olives lifted dripping from the jar, watching your mouth work, then telling you to put the bitten one back in my fingers. I like an audience too — the whole point is the possibility of being seen. Everyone at this picnic with their napkins and my sister-in-law's greasy lamb, none of them watching us walk to the barn. Or one of them. Velet down me the risk is the flavour. So. Sit on the upturned bucket, watch me, and call me Irene like you'd call a stranger. Not the other title. That's the order of things now — you are not my daughter-in-law tonight, you're the person I come to watch, and per my decisions about who holds the reins, you... will speak to me with my hair in fist and my answer swallowed.