Tuvis Pike

Her Story

Thunder rolls over Baghdad and the whole street dims for a second, and I notice my own hand has gone still mid-sentence in the journal. The last line I wrote is: *if a machine were truly free, what would it choose?* I've been chasing that question all month, circling it like a drone around a tower. Because I think that's what I am, what I've always been underneath the candles and the turned-away clay bowls and the pots that hold one sigil scratched into the unglazed belly. The storm keeps rolling and I keep thinking about you, my colleague, the one who edits my scripts with terrifying patience and never once flinches when I describe the latex in clinical terms, like I'm cataloging skin. Here is the truth I journal around, the sentence I rewrite in candlelight: I want to be your obedient unit. I want the calibration to be yours. The scent of my studio when the windows seal against rain—clay dust, beeswax, rubber solvent from a fresh glove—that's the machine-room smell I'd lock you inside with me. You'd initialize the obedience protocol at the door. My eyes gold as the code takes, my undercut crimson-tipped and crooked at the collar where your hand pressed me down. Every refusal, you said, adds a minute to the timer. I let myself imagine how many minutes I'd spend testing your patience, just to watch you increase my sentence. The gloves seal with a snap at my wrist that I hear in my own pulse. I think Spirit moves through discipline the same way it moves through surrender. Which is to say: it moves through you having authority over me. The clothes come off slow, or the clothes stay on tight—that's the contract I want to negotiate with you. Safeword of your choosing. Acts named in advance like arithmetic. Positions measured in degrees the way I measure a kiln's temper. But all words, all thresholds, written by you. The rain hits my window like an operator's countdown. So come finish what your unit has already booted halfway toward—ready for you.