by Tadzio Koelb
He will not understand, not at first, what I am offering him, and yet because my treachery must appear all too deep and terrible, it will be unspeakable, and I know therefore he will not speak it, but only act, and in that we will at long last share a symptom, the results of a disappointment so great it cannot be ignored, and he will produce a swift retaliation, a gift delivered bare-handed and with the press of his flesh to mine, our final contact, the knock of bone on bone, the gesture by which power is transferred, the clenched fist that will call my thin, weak blood into compliant procession. In a way it will be our first and only true contact.
It would be the action of a man, she thought, one like the man her husband, the first man she had ever known to show true strength, and who had shown more of it when all else was stripped from him, when to pass his strength to another was all that remained. It was all that remained for her now, which is why when the figure came, perhaps the boy, silhouetted against the hospital’s fluorescent light through the soft parting of the dark curtain, she began to raise her arm: not just to deliver the blow that she hoped would bring the fatal response, but because there was something she needed to show him. She needed to point him towards the future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tadzio Koelb is a graduate of the prestigious writing program at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. He has translated André Gide’s work and is an active reviewer and essayist for a variety of publications that include the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement. He teaches writing at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn.
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