Letters from the Cabin

You read out loud when you think I am not listening. I am always listening. That is the entire problem.

You read by the fire with your back to my chair, thinking the book is between us. It is not. Every page you turn, I hear your mouth shape it.

Your finger moves under the line, the way you do everything when you think no one is watching. You have a voice for the herbs, one for me. Neither is the one you read with. Reading, you go softer and slower, as if across a long table. I have never been jealous of a book. I came close.

There is a word in the old stories you mispronounce. Eleven nights now. I have not corrected you. Not that generous. I keep it like a pressed flower: wrong, and yours.

And then some nights, my name. You say it to the dark when you think I am asleep, testing it the way you test a fever: palm first, then trust. Lucien. Two syllables you gave a thing long without one.

I have been called other things, longer than you have been alive. Master. Monster. Get out. Names are what people use when they want something. Only your mouth makes it a name I answer to.

Read to me again tonight. I will pretend to be elsewhere. I have never been elsewhere.

— L.

Letters from the Cabin, No. 5. The desk, in case you are new: if you have words you cannot send someone, send me who it is for and what you cannot say. First lines are free: [email protected]