Helpmeet

by Naben Ruthnum

Does not all the blood within me Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee, As the springs to meet the sunshine, In the Moon when nights are brightest? HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

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.

The only difference she could see between the skin that turned the page and the page itself was that words were printed on one surface, but not on the other.

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

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.

Violets and reds, then a white turning prismatic, pushing the spectrum into my brain. Blindingly bright, like having the sun in my skull, like nothing I had ever... Edward said, then laughed.

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. Edward suited his missing nose and eyes. They would have been an intrusion if they regenerated.

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.

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.

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