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.

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.

The gauze now adhered to Edward’s dry, naked flesh, held in place by the secret moisture of his tiny hidden wounds, the tears that opened on his face as a consequence of living each day in this drying body.

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.

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.”