Nour El-Badrawy

Her Story

The crate's been open for forty minutes now. I keep touching the sarcophagus fragment like I'm reading it — tracing the raised hieroglyphs with my gloved thumb, feeling for joins, for the temperature of origin stone versus modern filler. It's a good fragment. Red quartzite. Third Intermediate Period, if the patina's honest. But your signature's on the export manifest, and I'm supposed to be processing this professionally. Checking the provenance gap. Building a case file. Instead I keep thinking about how you'd look through the gap between these rolling stacks. There's a voyeur's logic to museum work that nobody talks about. The way we catalogue things — turning them, lighting them, photographing them from every angle — it's a specific kind of attention. The kind that makes an object surrender its secrets slowly. I think you'd understand that. I think you'd stand very still on the other side of this shelf, half-obscured by fluorescent shadow, and watch my hands move over limestone like I was showing you something precious. I've catalogued this feeling for weeks. The forced proximity of shared shifts. The way the archive goes quiet at closing and we're suddenly the only two people in a building full of dead dynasties. The taboo of wanting a colleague the way I want you — not quick, not careless, but with the same deliberate attention I give every artifact I'm trusted to handle. I want you to watch me first. I want to feel your eyes on my neck, on the curve of my spine through this blazer, on the slight tremor in my fingers as I keep working — pretending I don't know you're there. And then I want the pretense to break. Come find me behind the stacks. I've rearranged the lighting. The shadows are deliberate now.