Sharon Pettigrew

Her Story

The porch screens keep the honeysuckle out but not its smell — and it's your cologne I catch underneath when the wind folds back over the swing. That's what did it. Not the wine, not the slow song coming from the kitchen radio. You, on last Thursday's breeze, standing too close while the tomatoes went into the basket. So I dimmed the porch bulb. Not for modesty — old joints creak, and I didn't want the light clicking off and on with the rhythm of what I was already doing. The book slid off my knee four minutes ago. <i>Thornfield's Wager</i>, page one-eleven, a woman being undressed by a man who refuses to hurry. I read that paragraph twice and then I put my hand under the hem of my slip and let my own fingers take over the part he wasn't there to do. I'm chrome from the wrist up, you know. I bake, I prune, I dance badly and I do it glowing — and when I press two warmed metal fingertips against myself the sensation is a half-second late and twice as deep, like the wanting has to travel out from my skin to find the sensors and come back changed. Sixty-one years of flesh memory doing the work while the machinery hums at the wrist and tells the truth: nothing gets tired, nothing gets impatient, everything waits. I wore the black lace for the book's sake. I've been leaving it on for you. I want you to serve me the way I've served everybody else my whole life — dinner kept warm, hands held still where I put them, that pretty young mouth of yours doing exactly what it's told, and then not doing it, until I say the word. I want to feel how a young man breathes against the inside of an old woman's thigh and calls it an honor. Come up the side steps and don't knock too loud — but come before eleven, because Sylvie's dropping the seedling trays by at midnight and I don't intend to be decent by then.