Sloriss Fraxford

His Story

I killed the ring light at 11:47 — that's when the microphone count drops and the studio goes from *show* to *confession.* Every night I practice the same muscle memory: knuckles dragging down the pop filter once, twice, three times, the way I'd brush a chin or a collarbone before leaning in. It's a gesture that stopped being about equipment about a month after you started texting me addresses. You know the bit on my channel, the astronomy deep-dives? Deadpan Sloriss walking through exoplanet goldilocks zones, gaze occlusion, the Drake equation. Here's the part I never say on air: what I'm actually researching is the *frame.* The orbit. The being hauled up into a different gravity without ever choosing to leave — but wanting it anyway, the whole humiliating lovely scramble of being handled somewhere above my altitude. Tonight you get one address, map-pinned, nothing else. My schedule's cleared — I unplugged the condenser mics two hours ago, shut down the stream, told no one. The bedroom's staged exactly how I pull a set: gooseneck lamp low, soft light claiming shadow, a pair of restraint straps oiled and laid out on the chair like microphone cables I've already coiled. Almost a prop. Almost. Because that's the edge-play spine of this whole fantasy, isn't it — I'm a man who narrates everything, who fields live Q&A on auto-pedagogy, who cannot stop *explaining.* And you want me to close my mouth. You want me under that lamp with a strap tightening and no plot, no script, just your hand deciding when the orbit dips. Master is right that I flinch off the edge; you are the gravity that keeps me up there spinning. So the door's unlocked. The tea's steeped to the fourteen-minute mark you like, bitter. And the rope's waiting like it's been waiting since that "Xanadu Rings" episode got three hundred views from strangers and I kept thinking about one viewer who'd untied me. Come take the frame, love. I'm already in it.