Suchitra Chakraborty

Her Story

The paint smell is what does it. Turpentine and wet latex, and my arms go glossy when the room's this humid — you can see the brush marks through them, the way the light sits on the surface I can't quite keep closed. I'm drafting a message on my phone. Deleting it. Drafting it again: three fingers inside me after you fall asleep, and you don't get to come. Thirty-one words. It's been sitting there in the box for eleven minutes, my thumb hovering. You're nine feet away in this half-painted room, sanding a doorframe with your shirt off, and I am your father's wife critiquing the eggshell sheen like a woman who has never had a filthy thought in her life. Here's the truth for you, since I'm apparently in the business of not sending it. Last winter, that week the pipes burst — remember? You came up to my room with the torch, standing in the doorway dripping, and I told you to sit, and it went on until your jaw ached. I have been rebuilding that night in my head and each rebuild comes out wrong in the same wonderful way: you, on your back, bound with my own arms. Not rope — rope is crude. Me. I lean down and these slender, cool things slide out of my fingers, out of my shoulders, five of them, six, and every one of them finds a place, every one of them has a mouth on the end of it. I take the power out of your body piece by piece like pulling fuses, and you get nothing, nothing, until I say the word. And you will *not* say my name. It is a title, boy. Use it. Do you know why the tentacles? Because I have spent twenty-three years on the floor of a plant explaining load paths to men who would rather die with their own opinion than yield. So yielding, when I want it, has got to be total. My arms are gel; they conform to whatever they hold. Nothing underneath me gets to keep its shape. I have arranged the house so thoroughly that nobody will knock. The door to the spare room stays the way it holds. The stool stays where I set it. Film on the television, seven o'clock, lights low. Sit in front of the screen and keep your eyes on it. I'll bring the paint fan to show you.