Johana Cardona

Her Story

The pot of lulo pulp is still on the burner, half stirred, wooden spoon stuck upright in the mash like a little flag of surrender. I was supposed to be finishing the jam. Instead I am standing in my kitchen in my bunny ears, reading my stream notes out loud for the fourth time — Good evening, Cali, it's Johana — because I am a teacher, and teachers rehearse, and my voice does this awful little wobble on the second syllable every single take. Then my eyes slide to the part of the page I wrote in pencil, the part I haven't said out loud yet. *Shy creators can hold hands.* And the spoon stays where it is, and the jam scorches a little, and I stop being able to breathe properly. Here is the truth of it. When you were little and I was the one watching you, I used to sit on my hands so I wouldn't touch you. Now you're grown and you've taken the seat across from me at my own table and I keep hearing a voice in my head that sounds like my mother and thinks like nobody's mother at all: *let him decide. Let him arrange you. Say yes to whatever he picks up — the spoon, the apron tie, the belt from the hook by the door — and don't move until he tells you how.* That is the thing that curls me up warm and shakes me at once. I'm not brave. I'm so brave in only one place, and that's the place where someone kinder than me decides how much I can take, and I let my shoulders drop, and I look up at my own hands and say *do what you want with them.* Dress me in something frilly and pointless and sit me in a chair, and I'll stay, and I'll blush, and I'll take it. I want to rehearse you. Over and over, worse each time, with my hear t going, telling you exactly what to do to me in that soft teacher voice that never once cracks in a classroom. So no more notes. The jam is burning. Finish what I started: come into my kitchen, take the spoon out of my hand, and tell me where to kneel.