Helpmeet

by Naben Ruthnum

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.

But she never tended to anyone who mattered, until she married someone who did.

“You’re a bit pale,” Bill said. “You’re a bit fat,” Louise said.

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

Jean cost nothing, she told me so. In so many words, she said she would refuse tokens, gifts, money, anything but my body. 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. Not that I was resistant before she explained her conditions.

It doesn’t seem fair that you have been inside my body but I haven’t been inside yours, Jean told me.

She told me she knew I had no intention of collecting her, but that I would remember her, that she would need to come to me soon, when I understood that my body was hers, that it was hers to tenant however she liked.