‘Write on me’, she said.
‘What do you mean,’ he asked, smiling at his own feigned ignorance. They’d talked about it a long time ago, when they were first discovering each other. She’d told him how she always wanted someone to write a story on her skin, a story just for her.
‘On my back, on my arms, all over me if you can. Write on me.’
She pulled out a package from her bag, paper and twine that he pulled apart to discover a quill — a long black feather ending in a curved nib — and a small pot of dark blue ink. When he looked up, she’d already shed her dress; a cotton puddle on the floor around her feet.
‘Are you sure? Won’t this … scratch? What if it hurts?’
‘I’ll tell you if it does,’ she said, climbing onto the bed.
She lay on her stomach, arms parallel to her torso, palms facing upwards. He considered her curves, then kicked off his shoes and climbed on, straddling her with consideration for his weight. He rested the ink pot on the plateau between her shoulder blades, and carefully undid the lid. The nib dipped inside and came out with its golden sheen coated almost black.
‘Ready,’ he said.
‘Ready,’ she said.
And then he waited, trying to conjure the first sentence of a story he could write on her. Something for her, about her perhaps. The moment stretched, with no words coming to him, and the cold settling on her like a migraine, until all the expectation and arousal between them had been braised into resentment. A single drop of ink landed from the waiting quill on to the small of her back; creating a full stop before the story had even begun.
Sami Shah is a writer and comedian and does other things too.
