Lorna Macrae

Her Story

The strap has worn its pale line into my shoulder again, and there's a silk sash folded in the pocket of my walking jacket that has nothing to do with the mountain. I keep it there because a year ago, on the far side of Beinn a' Ghlo, in a bothy with no door that closed properly and rain drumming the tin roof, you tied my wrists to the leg of a bench with it. I came up that hill to show you the cairn. You spent the last mile watching the way I breathe into the slope, and I let you, and I have not stopped letting you since. Here's what I can't say over the tea your mother pours. That afternoon you spread me out on a bench of splintered pine and I did nothing but receive it. You put your mouth on my ribs, one at a time, and named each one in a whisper as you went — an old rib, a slow rib, a rib I've carried for twenty-two years and never once showed anybody. I am a woman who teaches stillness for a living, and you found the one place where stillness is not calm. It's worship. It's being held down and studied until I forget the word for Tuesday. You were twenty years younger and you read my body like it belonged to the bothy and not to me. Afterward you carried my mat down the hill for me and never mentioned it. Your uncle shook my hand at the gate. I had your marks on my hip under my trousers and a fermata in my chest. I'm forty-six, love. I garden in the rain, I teach six o'clock classes, I have a husband's name and a varicose vein on my calf. And I am not done with that afternoon. So: tonight my mat is rolled in the hall, the sash is in the jacket, and there's an open hill outside my door and nobody due home. The door's off the latch. Bring the knots. Not the kind I teach.