Trypanophobia

She begs and claws at the sheets. I’ll do anything, she says. Anything. But she’s still when I tell her she must be still. She must be still or she might hurt herself. She freezes, biting a pillow, her knuckles white, clutching knots of bedsheet. She’s afraid of needles. I show her the needle. She whimpers and squeezes her eyes tight shut.

I pick a patch of skin on the back of her shoulder. I sterilise it with a swab, then another. She whines thinly. I don’t know if I can, she says. I put a hand on her back. I can feel her heartbeat. Fast, thudding. Her skin clammy and cool to the touch.

Stay very still, I say.

I am straddling her and she is small underneath me. Cowering. Eyes shut. Locked in the internal isolation chamber of her own fear. I click the needle out of its cap. She flinches at the click, but lies motionless, just as she was told to, breathing fast, rabbit-like.

I put the needle, loose but still shrouded in its plastic cap, on the bedside table. She is shaking now with the effort of holding herself still. I pick up my keys from the bedside table, holding them in a tight fist so they don’t jangle. Her eyes are still shut, her perception shrunk down to the patch of cool, sterilised skin on her back.

I press the tip of my house key into her skin. In her insensate state it must be convincing, because she gives a weak little cry. To her, the cold and pressure she feels is the thing she fears; a needle burrowing through her skin. Unbearable.

I drag the tip of the key half an inch along her skin. She grits her teeth and groans in imagined pain. Her brain transmutes a feeling of pressure into a feeling of piercing. Good girl, I tell her. I tell her it’s done. It’s in her. That wasn’t so bad, was it? She is wordless, twitching like she wants to move but doesn’t dare, a scruffed cat.

I tell her I’m removing the needle. I drag the tip of the key back along her skin, the same half-inch. She moans. Quietly, I switch the key with the needle and click it back into its cap, dispose of it, unused, in the yellow bin. I swab her back, and apply a plaster over a miniscule puncture wound that doesn’t exist.

She is drowsy afterwards. Cuddles into me, silent and floppy. We fall asleep like that. When I wake she is in the bathroom, contorted awkwardly to examine her back in the mirror. She has removed the plaster. I watch her a while. A small frown on her face. Bemused concentration as she tries to square what she sees with what she remembers. She notices me watching her in the mirror. Smiles. Returns softly to bed.