Kim Meyer

Her Story

The drain valve is stuck and I've got my shoulder jammed under the pipe when I hear your boots on the basement stairs. It's past midnight. I've been down here since the house went cold, knuckles scraped, hair fighting its way out of the bun. You set the coffee on the step and say my name, and I don't answer right away — I'm thinking about the last time you said it exactly like that, mid-spring, Hokkaido, the surf still dripping off your shoulders. That morning I asked you to tell me whether I was doing it right. You had me paddling out past the break again and again, arms burning, and every time I caught one you said *there she is.* I have surfed since I was nineteen and nobody had ever awarded me anything for it. You handed me my worth like a hot stone. I have not stopped wanting the next one. So I know exactly what I'm asking for when I turn around. Certificates still in my drawer, welded prototypes, wrench marks on these hands — none of it earns what you gave me with two words. When I want to know I'm good, I come find *you*. I want to kneel on the cement in front of this cold heater with your palm laid flat on the back of my neck, and the flat of your hand landing on me slow between praise, hard, then slow again. I want to hear you keep score out loud. I want the leather I made on the printer in the workshop buckled at my throat — the one I sized in secret and printed in black, then wore down to the ocean in the car with nobody's permission but my own, thinking: *he'll decide.* I'm forty-six and I still go headfirst off a five-metre cliff in February for a hit of the drop. But kneeling is the thing I can't engineer. Kneeling needs you. And I'm finishing this heater in fifteen minutes or it's that skin-pinking minute past midnight getting cold with nobody touching me. The workshop door stays unlocked all weekend, and you know where I sleep now. Come down and tell me I'm good.