Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

I lay there, my whole being collected into the inch of skin on my shoulder where his fingers rested. My room was small and strange. How was it that I thought of it as my home and believed that it belonged to me? It was just a temporary space that I had hung with things I’d purchased, so that I could believe I was safe inside it. And this was true, too, of everything I had believed about myself: that I was moral, that I was political, that I cared for the realities of strangers who were linked to me by parallel circumstance. These were beliefs I had pinned up so that I could imagine that I belonged to something valuable and that something valuable belonged to me. It was so easy for Nathan to take them down. I wanted to see them fall. I wanted to be brand-new, to experience love and pleasure as though I had never been hurt and never felt fear. And what more could be owed to a woman than that? What more could a woman ask for?