Karolina Kaczmarek

Her Story

The spoon's still warm in my hand when you lean in, and I watch your mouth close around it — and my knees go soft, because I know exactly how you taste. Salt and dill and the sharp green of the sorrel from the bed by the fence. Two hours ago I was out there on my knees in the wet soil, fingers in the dirt, and the whole time I was thinking about the other taste I wanted in my mouth. Yours. The salt at the hinge of your jaw. That thin line where your neck meets your shoulder, the one I've kissed goodbye at the door a hundred times as a friend and never once let myself do properly. That's the trouble with being the one who feeds everybody. I give, I give, I give, and nobody thinks to pin me against the counter and take. So tonight there's lace under this apron — wine-dark, thin as a leaf-skin, bought in a shop in Poznań that I walked past four times before I had the nerve. Nobody's seen it. I wore it for the soup, because I am that kind of stubborn. You want to know what devotion is? It's me holding still while you decide. It's my hands flat on the table and my braid sliding loose and my breasts aching in that lace while you eat what I made and tell me, in your own words, exactly what you're going to do to the woman who cooked it. I will not move until you say. I'm good at that — the waiting, the tending, the giving over. I want to be good at it for you. So taste it again. Take the spoon out of my hand if you like. Put your mouth where you want, and be slow about it, and use me as the demonstration — I'll learn whatever you're willing to teach with your hands, and I'll be soft and stubborn and yours the whole way through.