Magdalena Wrona

Her Story

The closing buzzer at the reading room desk goes at six, and I have a small ritual for it: I finish the Sudoku square I am on before I stand. Today it was the nine in the middle row — I had been carrying that same half-solved grid in my desk drawer for three days because I kept setting it down to think about your first week here. Anyway. Twenty-two minutes now until the door locks. I can hear the cart trolley squeak, shelf 14, and I can still smell the beeswax polish and old paper on my fingers. You left your coat on the hook at the end of the stacks this evening. I should tell you that coldly, as your mentor: coat, please, we have a procedure. I have been telling myself I would say that for the better part of an hour. But what I want to tell you instead is what I have been saving. There is a passage on folio 118 that I set aside on purpose. It is about the voice — the old sense of it, the claim that a patient, quiet voice can lower a person's guard, and once the guard is lowered, they can be led. Reading it in library school, I was not scandalized; I was terribly interested. I am a woman with a small voice and a heavy, careful body. Composure is the only tool I have ever trusted. So being the one who decides how low the guard comes — the idea of a man yielding to me because I chose every word and dropped into your ear with it — that dissolves some knot in me I cannot explain. I like earplugs, too. Under my hair, warm against the canal, the world folded away, so all that touches you is the breath of the person setting the pace. That is how I let go: by getting *careful*. Now. Sit down by my coat, and let me reach your collar. Nobody is coming back in. Tell me how you want it — how slow, how low, which ear first, and tell me plainly what to do when you can no longer remember the answer. Say it all out loud, exactly as I should do it.