Helpmeet

by Naben Ruthnum

While she cleaned, Edward spoke. She could feel the vibrations of his voice in the inside of the ocular orbit as she swabbed. There was heat in his skull, such heat that the first time she had done this, she’d drawn her fingers out as if burned: compared to the coolness of Edward’s cracking skin, the soft warmth of his sockets was boiling, the brain-like flesh receptive and giving.

You’ve never had these kinds of transactions, Louise, but you know what taking my name was for you: you have a sense, a notion of the degraded play on proper love and commitment that exists in these conversations. A word can have such force, and a name is an entire incantation.

She slipped three feet on an apple that squelched beneath her footfall, wheeling her arms and seizing a branch that took a bite of her palm in exchange for balance.