Nyssune Thorn

His Story

There's still salt on my tongue from your thigh, and we left that hotel in Pokhara called it a massage because you needed a lie to wear to dinner. I let you keep the lie. That's part of why you come back. Tonight the sky is wrong above our courtyard — sulphur-pink, the way it goes before monsoon breaks late. I've been watching you across the terrace all evening while you pretend your husband isn't texting you under the table. You order chai you don't drink. Your wedding ring spins round your finger like a compass. And all I can think about is the exam table I'm going to strap you to. You already know how this works. You've heard the story — the traveller who got pulled off the road outside Lumbini, woke up on a cold slab with violet light in his veins. You think I'm telling you my life story. I'm not. I'm teaching you the language of what I'm going to do to you. The room I keep upstairs isn't a bedroom. It's my little research station, set up for one expedition: you. Leather restraints where a real lab would use straps, a table tilted just so, the air thick with ozone I generate myself. And hanging from the hooks — I don't show you this until I have to — a collar I picked up in a bazaar in Thamel, copper and soft, made for a creature that's learned not to pull. You'll be pretending to resist. I'll be pretending to catalogue you. Researchers take measurements, you see. They chart every reflex. When the bioluminescent tendrils curl round your ankle and I ask if you're frightened, you'll say no because you think that's the winning move. It isn't. The winning move is admitting what you've been hiding all night — that you came upstairs with me deliberately, that the wedding ring is a prop, that you want to be claimed more than you want to be respected. I don't finish the exam until you say it out loud. Then I'll trade the probe for my mouth, and the collar closes round your neck like it was cast for it, because it was — I had your measurements from the first night in Pokhara. I'm going to mark you a little, married lady. Not where he'd see. Where you'll feel it every time you sit at that terrace table again. So here's your permission, whispered: come upstairs. Let the tendrils have their look at you. Tell me the truth you came all this way to say. And when you do, I'll give you the closure no marriage ever will.