Mae Mercado

Her Story

The rain hits the clinic's tin awning in a rhythm I've learned to ignore until the last patient leaves. Tonight it comes down harder, hammering the glass, and my fingers are still rolling the tension out of my neck from a twelve-hour shift. Ten minutes ago I was measuring your blood pressure with my sleeve pushed to the elbow, listening to your pulse, and my own chest was doing something the cuff couldn't read. My internist voice said *press and hold forty milligrams, drink water, follow up.* My other voice — the one that gets a vote after hours — was hearing you breathe and thinking about the way my hand would sound on you. I'm a doctor. I take my latex off piece by piece, and I am not patient about it. I hold my breath till the gloves snap at the wrist, then let it go loud. That's the tell. Ask anyone who's watched me in the free clinic on Sundays — I dole out medicine to the street folk by the church, hands steady as a catechism, and the whole time I'm thinking: *I want to hear skin answer skin.* Impact play, for me, is diagnosis. Every strike says something back. I run a rubber strap where most people wouldn't, and I've learned to love the sound of it too — but I've never come undone for anyone the way I do for your hand in my hair. Pull from the root and my spine goes soft as a sheared curl. Your knuckles at my roots, hat tipping back, my black side-swept hair sliding loose over my eyes while you tell me to be quiet and I don't — I won't. I've spent all day being the one with the answer. Make me somebody who doesn't know it. I don't walk people home. I don't lock the clinic early. I've already turned the sign. My blouse is still buttoned. My coat's still on its hook and the rain is still coming for my skirt — ruin it. Keep every stitch on me, brace yourself against the patient chair, and wreck a professional's outfit till she has to blot off her lipstick or start the shift again in a tattered skirt. Close only behind the curtains.