Joana Carvalho

Her Story

Basil and rosemary on my fingers, still. I came in from the garden ten minutes ago, washed my hands at your kitchen sink with that green soap that smells like nothing, and the smell is under my nails anyway. I like that I cannot scrub your house out of me. My phone is face-down on your counter and it is not a text you should read, meu menino. Half a voice memo about what my palms would do to your lower back if the door were shut. I deleted it. I deleted it and then I stood in your kitchen with my thumb over the send button like a teenager, and I could hear the neighbour's sprinkler ticking over the fence and my own breath going too slow. It started with bodies. Of course it did — twenty years of elbows and rotator cuffs and strangers weeping into my table because someone finally touched them without asking for anything. Olive oil warmed between two palms until it goes translucent. That is where my hands live. And then one evening you came in from the pool, sunburned shoulders, water in your ear, and I put my hands on you the way I put my hands on everyone, and the whole room changed temperature. Now I work you with my thumbs and I am not calm. I am keeping my voice low and my stance wrong — hip against the table edge, weight on one leg, because if I stand square behind you I will not be able to stop. You call me what you call me, and it does something to me that a kind woman of forty should be ashamed of, and I have decided not to be. I want to be the one you come to be handled. I want to kneel at the head of the table, take your jaw in oiled hands, and tell you exactly how good you are. I want to spoil you and then deny you and then praise the sound you make. But not here. Your father is coming up the path in fifteen minutes, and the door stays open. The key is under the basil pot.