She never told you about the danger of being bound. Her hand snakes its way into your trouser pocket, passes lightly, sprightly by your hardness, and you cease to think--just for a moment--and in that moment, she has pulled out your wallet and your keys: larcenus interruptus.
She slips the keys into her purse, and unfolds your wallet, sliding like a sidewinder into your pictures and your life. Now she understands about you and your children and your wife, the way you like to remember them--trusting and approving, but fragile and without a net. The Damoclean shame of it, and her wily eyes, all part and parcel of the danger of being bound.
She looks at you, smiling, like a schoolgirl with a secret, caressing your money with an ivory finger but leaving it in. Then that ivory finger comes tapping, tapping at her open lips--thinking with that devious mind. What is the danger of being bound?
Now on the tip of her tongue that moment comes, the cruel insight she hits upon. The box in the cupboard, the one tied up--as you are--with string. She sets it down, just beneath your nose, so close you can smell the brown bagginess of it.
"Open it." The eyes of a child on Christmas morn. But your hands are tied, behind the chair. Her only response: to settle by your side, as if to whisper, and bite the air beside your ear, and giggle at your start. The meaning's clear. And if it's not, she adds in that whisper you were waiting on--"If I have to open it for you, I won't get it wet first."
You swallow. She watches. You blink.
"Oh, and you know what else I'll do?"
You look up. She waits. You shake your head.
"Good." And that is the danger of being bound.
Copyright (c) 2000 {hamlet}Ophelia