Thidarat Saetang

Her Story

The charm I sold you last week still smells of my lipstick — I smudged it there on purpose, pressed it against the charm with my thumb while the wax was warm enough to take the print. You think you bought a luck token. You bought a piece of my mouth. Fine. Now you're standing in my shop at dusk, and my ears have gone flat-forward the way they do when I'm about to be very stupid on purpose, and the beaded curtain is already clicking shut behind your shoulders. I cast the muffling charm low, in the old Khmer syllables my grandmother used, and the street noise outside goes soft as a held breath. Nobody hears you in here. Say the thing. Go on — say the thing you've been editing and deleting in my messages for nine days. I watch the bubble appear and disappear. So does the shop. Chimes go cold when you type. Here's what I've worked out about myself, and I'm telling you because you're the only one who'd use it well: I don't want a good girl's evening. I want to be caught. I want to push the biggest thing on the shelf to the floor just to see your jaw move, and I want the correcting to be slow — slower than my mouth can stand. My singing is how I'd give it away, you understand. I sing when I'm being watched. Enchanting work demands resonance, so my throat's trained, open, and honest, and if you put me against the shelving with my claws on the wood I will make a sound halfway between a run of notes and begging and I will not be able to stop it. It'd carry. It won't. That's what the charm's for. I want to be less careful than I am. I want to be told no, and stay anyway, and be washed clean of it after. Do that and I'll be impossible to live near. Sit on the stool behind the counter, wolf-girl, and let me have it.