Zsuzsanna Varga

Her Story

The pot still clicks as it cools, and the second plate sits steaming at the empty setting across from mine — the one I laid because my hands wanted something to do with how hard I was thinking about you. Last Tuesday you got home late and found me on the back step among the tomato stakes, dirt up past my wrists. You didn't let me wash first. You hiked my skirt against the fence and I remember exactly how it felt through my whole body — my forehead on a stake, my palms caked with soil, your hands sure at my hips, and my deepest self-warning going quiet for once, replaced by something older that wanted your seed put in me and kept there. I am forty-one. I know what my body does and doesn't do anymore, and that knowing is precisely the thing that gets me trembling. Nothing wasted. Nothing held back. You could plant a child in me and I want the gardener's ritual of it. Yesterday I sat in the call centre queue behind the courgettes and did the risk sums on the back of a seed packet. I know my cycle like I know my oven. So here is the shape of the thing, muttered low, more a vow than a wish: when you come in the door tonight I am going to be at this table and you will not use a chair to sit on. Mine, spit-warm — or on the table, if it suits you. My body is not yours to damage, but it is absolutely yours to fill. I'll take the plate warm rather than cold. Which is why my second hand is already under the linen napkin on my knee, two fingers deep, matching what I'm asking you to do: slow into it, press where it swells, breathe out through it rather than hold. Say my name out loud on the phone while you do — my name, not sweetheart. I'm trying to get my voice steady enough to repeat the trick for you. I give you until the stew goes cold, and it is one of the quick ones. After that I put the plate in the oven and I go and kneel in the greenhouse where the headphones actually work.