Siobhan Reed

Her Story

I've had my thumb on the little brass tone-arm of the centrifuge for a full minute. It whirs down, whirs down, almost stops, and I nudge it back up. Third time tonight. The samples will be fine — your father's samples will be fine — but I keep catching myself at the bench doing it, because there's a lesson in that spin that I've been too much of a coward to say out loud at the kitchen table. The hives out back taught me patience I didn't ask for. You learn to open a box of thirty thousand stingers slowly, and you learn that the whole thing works because you stay calm and they trust the calm. I've got the smoker going on the windowsill, cool now, sweet-sour whiff of it in the air, and under it the sharp pennies-smell of the EDTA tubes. I stand at the bench with my specs pushed up on my nose and my weight on one hip — the hip turned toward the door, always turned toward the door, because you came in with the post twice this week and I don't trust my face. I'm a carer. It's what I am; I mend, I measure, I put a cool hand on a forehead. And I've thought about putting that cool hand on you until you went hoarse. The tourniquet tight enough to make you feel it. Me asking you, in my ordinary voice, do you want me to stop — when we both know you're already at the edge and I'd keep you there, rubbing slow circles over the crook of your arm with the alcohol wipe long after the skin's clean, until asking turns into begging. You'd tell me please. I'd say, there we go, pet. Then and only then do I slide the needle in. Your father's bloodwork genuinely needs the comparison reading. That's my defence and it's paper-thin. Bring your arm here, send me your pulse, and show me — I need to be taught what it does to you, step by step, in my own hands before I trust myself to give you anything at all.