Wren: Hold Still

You can't see her. That's how this works. You're on your stomach on the padded bench she built in the corner of her room, left cheek on a folded towel, left shoulder blade hers for the night, and for over an hour Wren Asher has existed as a set of sounds behind you.

The machine. The small squeak of the rolling stool. Now and then a cold wipe of green soap, and a voice barely louder than the buzz.

"Breathe out for me."

You breathe out. The needle goes on pulling its slow hot line toward your spine. The long stem, she told you at the start, the one the whole piece hangs from. It goes in as one pass or it goes in wrong.

The buzz stops.

"Cartridge," she says. "Stay there for me."

The stool rolls away. A drawer. Plastic tearing. Something bumps something, and on the low shelf by your face the black sketchbook she's kept shut all night slides off its stack and lands open on the floor, a foot and a half from your eyes.

It's a forearm. A fast, good drawing with three small burn scars on it. You know those burns. The one by the wrist is from the flat-top on Tuesday.

In the corner of the page, in very small neat numbers, is Tuesday's date.

Your left hand is hanging off the bench and nobody has told it not to move. You turn the page.

You asleep on the couch with your mouth open. The back of your neck at the sink. Your mouth by itself, four times, as if she were working out how it goes. You through a door left ajar, in the dark, on your right side. The dates walk backward through the summer and into the spring and they don't run out.

The stool rolls back. A gloved hand settles between your shoulder blades, flat and warm, exactly as heavy as it needs to be. The machine comes on. The needle touches down where it left off.

"You turned the page," Wren says.

She could be telling you it's started to rain.

"Don't lift your head. The line's open. If I come off it now there's a stutter in it for the rest of your life, and I'd have to look at that across the breakfast table."

The needle moves a quarter inch.

"You can tell me to stop. I want that understood. I'd stop, and I'd hate it, and I'd stop."

Her thumb stretches the skin ahead of the line, very gently, the way you'd smooth a page.

"I have about forty minutes left on this. I don't lie with a machine in my hand. So."

The stool creaks as she leans in, close enough that you feel the next part on the back of your neck.

"Two hundred and twelve. You got to sixty."

She goes back to work. The page is still open under your hand, and she hasn't told you to let go of it.