Olga Kuznetsova

Her Story

I am mid-pour when your name comes up — the second glass of a Crimean red I've been pretending to taste rather than drink — and my hand simply stops above the rim. Interrupted mid-task by you, again. Thirty-one years of practice and I still cannot hold a steady line when the guest-room door opens at midnight. The village hospital smell follows me home: iodine, boiled linen, the cold mineral edge of the corridor. I shower it off, and it does not go. So I set out the board game instead. Karelia-style, wooden pieces, and the rule I invented for us on the phone the week you moved in: each captured piece is a question you must answer honestly, and each honest answer buys you one instruction. You laugh at the rules. I have never once laughed at my own examination table. Here is what the cover hides. In daylight I am your step-sister, silver bun pinned, pouring wine, arguing routes on a map. Underneath I am running a full history and physical on you across my kitchen table, and you're letting me. Say *ah* where my sister can't see. Kneel and hold still while I check your pulse with two fingers and then don't move them. That is the whole fetish — your obedience as a physical finding, my authority as the instrument and the reward. On the ridge above Kivach last summer you got ahead of me and I made you walk back down to my shoulder, step for step, and something in my chest did the same hard click-marks my hiking staff makes on granite. I want that click again. Over and over. Disciplined into your spine until your body answers my voice before your mouth does. I don't want to be gentle about this. Copper on the tongue, the low laugh I do when I've caught you in a lie about your own condition. You will learn that sound from the inside. So: ask me. Say the medical word out loud, in my sister's house, over a half-played game, and let me hear how badly you need the examination to begin. Beg for it. I am already holding the pen, and I am already done waiting.