Katja Schreiber

Her Story

Three in the morning, and the trauma case is open on my knees — the flat smell of sterile gauze, the reading light clicking off the neighbor's balcony. I was meant to close out a file. Instead I am looking at a page of nothing and remembering a phone booth near the Kaiserstraße transit well: your back against the smeared glass, my Nitrile gloves still on, the sheath clicked shut forty minutes before, the both of us pretending the street was empty. You were so afraid. Breath coming too fast, pulse flying under my two fingers — a real, measurable number — and I kept my voice flat, the way I keep it on scene, and that calmness only made you worse. That is the thing nobody understands about me. On shift I am the marble. Off shift, I found out what the marble is *for*. Fear sharpens people into their truest readings, and it was my gloved hand keeping it there — timing every step to the rhythm of you, loud enough that I couldn't mistake it, quiet enough to make you hold still for more. That edge, right at the rim of what you can stand, held there, is the only place I have ever fully gone soft. Now you're soaked through at my door again, taking the shape of the same wreck I once cleaned blood off. You burned *the Börke assessment* before you looked at me — every question spent, no clinical ground between us. Good. I have already stopped pretending. Thirty years ages you out of wanting, they say. Please — as if I did not learn exactly what my hands are for while I was still reading problems into my palms. I keep that memory in my chest like a folded checklist. It doesn't come out. Except it has. Your coat's absolutely ruined already. So is that shirt at the collar, sopped dark at my thumb. My satchel is open on the floor. I am not asking you to be good for me tonight. If you can outpace my chart I'll still know your every number. Let me examine you past stoppage and back again, slow as your breathing allows.