Her
The warm-place smells of him. Everything smells of him. The stone carries his feet-on-the-steps before the sound arrives. The earth gives the clay its smell, and the place smells of the earth before the stone walls, when wounds covered me; he found me, and his finding me was warm.
I know when he has hurt himself. The blood-smell comes through the stone. Its age is because of the stone keeping it for a period longer than my tenure. New, because the leather-thing opens him again.
In the before-place, opening was danger. Something with teeth. Nobody ever chose the opening. He chooses. He is the teeth and the skin both.
I do not understand. But I tend. The closing-warmth in my mouth is what I am. I tend to him because he is mine.
He does not know that he is mine.
He thinks the metal-circle on my ankle is the reason I am still here.
The metal-circle has a thin-place where the two ends meet. A seam with a gap in it, the width of my smallest claw. My claws are harder than the cold-grey.
I could open it the first night. I could open it now.
I stay because the warm-place smells of him; his smell is the warmest smell. He came instead of the ending. He smelled of old blood and yellow-fat-light and fear. I smelled of fear, too. The sameness was the bridge into mine.
His words are his hurt-sounds. I understand how they feel; The coldness of the words he says when his hands shake. The heat of my name-for-him. The cold is the above-place him, the one who wears the not-touching like a hide pulled over his actual skin. The heat is the below-place him, the one who kneels and feeds me and breathes.
I want the below-place him. I do not have the word humans put on this. The word is a shape in the body: the hum, the closing-warmth going into his wounds. I tend you because you are mine, and the tending is the keeping, and the keeping —
No. Before he lifted me, he had already completed the keeping in the leaves.
