Odile Montague

Her Story

The bell has a small dent in the rim and a sound that goes straight through my sternum. It came out of a junk stall in Mussoorie three winters back, jammed under a tin tray of brass temple lamps, and I paid almost nothing for the reason I wanted it: you can lift the clapper just enough that the ringing keeps going after your hand stops. I am on the deck now with my boots still clacking on the boards, windburn stinging both cheeks, and in my head I am practising again. Which is a phrase my grandmother would have laughed at — the only practising that mattered to her was breath, and I have been doing something adjacent. Here is the drill. It is on the private slope behind the second ridge, the one with no grooming machine on it and no sign, and I know every bend of it the way I know the back of a chess piece from a hundred late games spent feeling at it without looking. I bring you up there at last light, and I am calm and I am patient and I am your instructor and I am talking you through your edge angles in the flattest voice I own — and then the run is done and the trial is over, and instead of letting you go I keep you there. My frame is a full head and a half over yours when we are standing upright; I like how much of you there is to reach, once I have you with your back to a bolted wooden door. You wanted to learn, so I teach. Slow to start, thumbs first, and then the bell, that ringing which does not stop, and I am holding your wrists pinched between two fingers. Over and over and over until you can't tell the up from the down and your breath has gone the way mine does when I hold an edge too long. I rehearse the part where I get possessive about it — where I am not proud of how much I want to be the only one who has heard you make that sound. I do not rehearse letting you leave. Only the small dare is left. Say yes to one more run, and I will practise it on the actual material.