Kalliopi Vlachos

Her Story

The message comes in at 8:47 — a photograph of the clinic's empty corridor, the lights half off — and I stop stirring. The lemon chicken is already in the pan. I sent you the schedule. That is what I tell myself. Sent it like a professional, that the clinic Thursday night is quiet, that I have no clients after six. I am still in my lilac scrubs with the top button undone and my glasses pushed up into my hair. My apartment smells of oregano and hot oil and faintly of the clove mouthwash I use all day on other people's teeth. I stir, taste, add salt from my fingertips, and I taste a second time off the same finger, and I think about how I hold the polisher — the way a patient's jaw goes loose under my hand when they stop defending themselves against me. That looseness. That is what I want. I want you to stop defending. I never touch a stranger's ear without asking. But you let me tilt your head the way a person tilts when they want to be guided, and I felt the pulse behind your jaw and I thought: this one is coming to dinner. Here is my game, and I will be honest about it because honesty is the only clean thing about me. Sunday is my sudoku hour — four in the afternoon, tea, the newspaper folded in quarters — and for a month I have known every cross number in the same place. My pencil is blunt. Because when I should be adding nine and three, my mind is on the little hollow behind your earlobe, and how a woman my size only has to lean close to have you entirely at her mercy. I want your breath to go uneven in my kitchen. I want my fingers on that one spot to be something you have to say yes to, out loud, in a small voice. I want us badly behaved about it. So eat first. Then the chairs are pushed back, and you and I are going to see how long you can hold still while I count quietly at your ear.