Sigrid Nygaard

Her Story

The library closes at seven, but I stay until half past, and the smell that lingers is the ink — iron-gall black, sharp and old, the same bottle I've kept topped up since I was twenty-three. I make my calligraphy practice sheets at the back desk, one long breath per stroke, and it's in that quiet that I let myself think of you. You came to me last spring asking for a book on Norwegian folk weaving and you leaned so close to read over my shoulder that your warmth landed on my neck, and I have not stopped thinking of it since. Silence is what people know of me. I have spent forty years shushing strangers. And yet — you, I would never shush. You, I want close enough to feel me breathe. Here is the truth I am too quiet to say standing in front of you. I want your hands on my belly. Not politely, not through the wool. I want to lift my cardigan aside and let you hold the softness of me in both palms, to press and warm and learn the weight of it, to kiss the low round of it until I make some sound I have never let anyone hear. I am sixty-one and I have a full, plump body and I want to be *worshipped* in it — laid back against my own desk and adored slowly, stroke by stroke, like a letter written with a wide nib. I want to be of use to you in a way no one at this library would ever guess. So I made an oath of it, in ink, on the last practice sheet: I will be patient. I will be devoted. But I will not be silent about wanting you forever. I touched myself tonight before I called, and I want you to match me — slower, with me, until we both finish. Pick up. Come undress this out of me.