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The bird stops. It jerks its sleek head toward the door and flies away in
one long fluid unfurling of wing and intent. Enough. But it has shown it can
get to me, Sophia thinks. It can get to me whenever it wants.
The mouse has fled just the same.
Her husband enters the house without knocking, as he always does.
Drops his things on the foyer floor without a care.
“I am home! I am here! Where is my wife?”
Sophia is on her feet and in his arms in the same fluid unfurling
movement as the heron’s ascent. It is him, it is him, and there can be
nothing wrong now, how stupid she’s been, how young and small and
reckless with herself. Her husband holds her so tight. His arms dwarf her,
envelop her, the most exquisite suffocation. He smells of growing greens
and blackberries and ripe hops and deep, tilled, tended earth. And a little of
blood and milk and musk, always, yes, of the animals he works with, their
bodies and their breath and their hot, quick life. No smell excites Sophia
more than this.
“My love, my love,” she whispers.
His big hand cups her head, strokes her long hair, and then he wants her,
of course he does, and she wants him too, his kisses and his strength and his
warmth and his need.
Your Needs Are Our Wants.
“Are you happy, Sophia?” he whispers urgently as he devours her.
He says her name over and over, until it no longer sounds like her name
at all, but someone else’s, and for a moment, Sophia could swear it is
someone else’s name. Other vowels and other consonants, strangers in the
halls of her ears. But she shakes her head against his chest and the moment
floats away. The world is Sophia again. Sophia, Sophia, Sophia. The tickle
of his breath in the curve of her neck; the tickle of the field mouse’s fur on
the curve of her foot; the tickle of the glass breaking beneath the heron’s
beak.
“You are happy, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
“Yes, my darling,” Sophia sighs, and she is not lying. Not yet. The
mingling of their breath is a biome in which only the truth can thrive.
“Yes.”
She serves him an early breakfast in the easing dark, as light on her feet
as dancing. All sins forgotten in the slicing of toast, all foolishness in the
hot, real grounded smell of good cheese, and won’t they have a day, the two