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.
