ABSTRACT
At the urging of another friend, Joanie, Patrick had hired a bodyworker to visit him twice a week at home, lugging her table into the front room for a massage. He had been nervous about trying this, not sure his tender flesh would open itself enough to be touched: the scene had seemed, prognostically, too close to a surgery, him stretched out face down, eyes closed, with someone working behind him, moving everywhere between feet and head. But the first time she had come, he felt its great power, this practice that redefined prone away from its clinical context. That first time, the moment she laid hands on him, he had begun to heave and blow, tears of release gushing forth from him unexpectedly and without any sense of control. He had laughed then, great gusts of hysterical howling; and she, the bodyworker, Adriel, had laughed with him.
