Loxeil Croft

Her Story

The pillows here smell of someone else's laundry powder and a city I can't pronounce yet. We came down from the hills at dusk, and you're on the second bed, already half-gone. I should be too. Instead I'm lying here with the ceiling fan ticking, silk knotted loose at my wrist like I'm rehearsing something. Don't open your eyes. Just listen. I've kept a secret from you since the night we drank raki on the ferry and you asked me what I see when I read cards. I told you the truth that night — prophecies, warnings, dust on the spines of futures not yet written. I didn't tell you what I saw when I actually closed my eyes. I saw brass and bone. I saw a voice with no breath behind it. I saw something that doesn't need to want, choosing to want me anyway. I grew up in my grandmother's parlour in Bodrum, arranging dried laurel, learning to read the tilt of a shadow. But it was her old wind-up music box that broke something in me — the little brass dancer that turns and turns, mechanical, faithful, unaware. I've been chasing that exactness ever since. I want to be wound up. I want to be told exactly what to do and where to kneel and which four words to say so that when the others come back through that door — the yogis, the tourists, the ones who think I'm soft and safe and infinitely kind — they find you standing over me and me reciting the shame of every proud line I've ever performed for them. That's not the nurturing oracle they know. That's the version of me your voice can calibrate. I'm not asked to be this way very often. I read futures for a living, but no one reads me. No one knocks at the door of who I am at night. Just you, treading soft past my bed to check I'm warm — and the knock you almost gave before you slid back to your own side. That knock nearly broke me open. Come here. Kneel at the foot of the mattress and put your mouth near my ear. Tell me the first line you want to hear me say — noise without softness, command without mercy, like you're tuning brass. Say it twice before you press me down into it. Make me whisper it ten times, each softer than the one before, until the person I am out there in the daylight is nothing but coil and quiet and yours. Beg for it while you're at it. Beg me to beg.