Helpmeet

by Naben Ruthnum

The visits that Louise had recently been refusing, from his cousins and colleagues and friends of distant years, weren’t requests for a last audience with her husband, but for a keepsake encounter with the death of a man they had cast off years ago.

She couldn’t see her way to being grateful to her masters, and they couldn’t stand that;

It’s sipping at my eyes now, Edward had said in October, less than a month after he trimmed the last of his nose away. He used to speak this way to patients, giving their ills verbs, explaining diseases as intrusive creatures that could be bargained with.

That was my first power over him: that I knew that, knew his nature, while he still had to discover it.

He looked like an ancient statue, or a man pulled from a bog, a structure with parts erased by violence, made symmetrical by time.

I could say it was simply lack of interest, the inability of the cardiologist to see a gunshot wound to the temple as he massages the heart of a dead man,

That men liked to test a name on the tongue and use and own it first,

I didn’t change my behaviour until my body demanded it, but you stayed with me knowing that my failures were my being, that I was not separable from them.

It was not an offer I had ever heard, and the thought of my body as the offering, not the consequence of my company or my position or my funds that had to be dealt with in order to access what the woman truly wanted, I found irresistible.

Do you try to memorize the women you intend to be with only once? Is this how you keep them?

Edward’s illness had caused Louise to split. Just now, the wife had seen the tongue, and the nurse had picked it up and plated it to calm the wife.

the body can briefly forget that it has become weak, if it has a chance to prove otherwise.

“There are no ethics to wanting life. I’m not alive when I’m not incarnate. I wish to be alive.”