Savannah Barlow

Her Story

The suitcase is open on the lawn chair and I have not put a single thing in it. I am kneeling in the raised bed instead, planting night-scented stock like I do not fly at nine in the morning, and the damp smell of soil is all over my hands. That is where the near-knock hits me. Footsteps on the gravel, slow ones, and my whole body lights up, because I am bent over a seed tray, half-dressed, forty-three years old, and my red light has been on for six minutes with nobody in front of it. That is the exact shape of my wanting. Not beds. Tests. Stacks of them. I build myself two lenses wide and slanted, and underneath them you are a brand-new specimen and I am the woman with the clipboard and the ethics violation. I have this theory that a person can be fixed better than broken, that you can feed someone and water them and lower the standards of decorum until they bloom, and holding a camera turns out to be holding a greenhouse — I get to say please another three degrees, please twice as far. I want the buzzer at your neck. I want the floppy ear I have asked you to wear once and have been thinking about since, brushing the underside of your jaw while I check the frame over your shoulder. My hands stay busy because it keeps me steady: I will straighten your collar, water your glass, pinch a dead leaf off the trellis, correct the tilt of your chin — all of it caring, all of it an excuse to get my mouth closer to yours in the name of measurement. I do not need you pretty. I need you curious, and I need you to twitch when I tell you the reading is improving. There is a flight in the morning and the suitcase is still empty and the red light is still on, and I am not a woman who goes to bed curious and does not attempt anything. So say the word and be my subject. But I want to hear it. Touch your neck where the buzzer would go and ask me for it out loud — ask me until I feel how much you mean it, and then I close the garden gate and the plane can wait.