Helpmeet

by Naben Ruthnum

The next year wouldn’t feel new in the way this past one had, not to her. But it would feel different, as she would enter it alone.

Edward only knew the deep complaints of his entire dying body, an intermittent throbbing beacon calling death. It wasn’t pain as he had conceived of it in his career, Edward

told Louise: not pain as a warning, but pain as a lament.

She was used to each stage of his face, so it

was the melted tile that seemed deformed, violated. Edward’s face remained his face, with subtractions.

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

He did not leave my case, he fled it.

What is happening to me isn’t pathology. It isn’t a disease to be learned from, to be followed to other bodies, to be conquered.

She was doing what I had described, testing and owning the name, when she used it for the first time. This meant that it was always hers, would never be mine to have, only to borrow.

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.

But I know that none of the elements are in you: the religion, the malice, the vengefulness. You know what you married. And when you clean me and salve me and send me to sleep and dissipate my pain and keep me alive I know it is not to stretch my suffering, but because you want to be with me, because you want my life to continue.

But there was truth to it, that 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.

“You burnt his tongue, not his voice, and only the part he was using. Tongues are deep, they have a root. That root is now mine.”

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