I feed her from a bowl on the floor, the way you feed a dog. She eats on all fours, her antlers dipping forward like buttresses framing the vessel, her mouth in the broth. Clinical. Pastoral. The farmer’s son tending an injured animal.

She spills. Her tongue traces the cracks between the flagstones, searching for the last of the warmth, and that is the reason I built the stand.

Twelve inches.

The height of her hands when she kneels. Not the height of a table. Not the height of a seated woman. The height of a kneeling creature whose feeding posture is maintained at the precise elevation.

Not kindness.

Maintenance.

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Three years of evenings, and the chain has become a clock.

The iron links produce a specific sound when she shifts from sitting to kneeling.

A clink followed by a metallic whisper as the cuff rotates on her ankle.

I have heard this sequence approximately one thousand times. I could transcribe it the way I transcribe plainchant, but I will not.

It would mean I have been listening.

It has been three years of the Summa opened on the desk. Three years the beeswax candle lit, and the quill in my hand with her body beside my chair in the posture I taught her.

She knelt beside the desk.

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After the nineteenth day, the cellar became a country with a shrinking border.

I kept track of the distance between us; the border being the only discipline I had left following the oiling, stirring, touch, and the hum that vibrated through me.

Three feet in the first week.

Two feet in the second.

Eighteen inches by the third, close enough to see that each of her spots was not circles but ovals; slightly elongated along the axis of her body, the distribution following a pattern I was mapping in the margins of the bestiary.

The mapping justified by the study.

The study justified by theology.

The theology justified by the need to understand the creature.

The understanding required proximity.

Eighteen inches from a naked woman’s body with a pen in one hand and an erection in the other.

The erection was not always present at eighteen inches.

Sometimes the morning’s flagellation sated the appetite, and the pain’s grammar held the body in its penitent posture.

Sometimes, the study’s genuine questions occupied the appetite, such as the antler growth rate, the caloric intake, and the healing speed.

But the arousal was present often enough that its absence became the exception. It was the air in the cellar, the scent, the warmth, the sound of the chain’s domestic clock, the hum that started whenever I descended the stairs and didn’t stop until I climbed them again.

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I installed the chain on the third day.

The ring was driven into the stone wall with a masonry bit; the chain purchased from the smith under the pretense of securing a gate. The cuff was iron, too large because her ankles were thinner than my wrists. The wrongness of the cuff’s fit meant the iron slid loosely around the bone, and the sliding produced a sound a small, metallic percussion, that became the cellar’s clock.

She resisted the chain.

Not violently. She resisted the way a wild animal resists a halter by pulling. The pulling was the application of a consistent force against a constraint. She pulled until the chain went taut. Then she assessed.

The chain held.

She pulled again.

Same force.

The chain held.

She sat down, looking down at the chain, then the wall, before gazing up at me.

She tilted her head, processing.

She did not pull again.

The creature accepted the constraint after two trials, suggesting cognitive assessment of the system’s structural integrity and an adaptive decision to conserve energy.

She accepted the chain. Not because the chain was unbreakable, but because...I did not know why.

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I flagellate on Tuesdays and Fridays.

The schedule is important.

The schedule is the load-bearing structure that keeps the rest of the building standing. The schedule does not hide things, unlike the walls and roof, which are built to conceal a man doing things inside.

It’s about discipline.

The flagellation is about discipline.

The prayers, matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline, the canonical hours, are about discipline.

The fasting on Wednesdays, the cold water, the hair shirt I wore for the first three years before the skin beneath it became a permanent landscape of welts that no longer served the purpose of reminding me of my flesh, all of it is discipline.

I am a disciplined man.

A priest who has served this parish for fourteen years, who hears confessions, administers the sacraments, visits the sick, buries the dead, and delivers sermons that the village has described as righteous.

Sermons that the blacksmith’s wife describes as terrifying in a way that made me feel clean.

Terrifying.

Clean.

I flagellate on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the blood runs down my back in channels created from the welts and scars that form a topography mapping fourteen years of discipline.

Eleven before, three since.

Three since the thing in the cellar.

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