Yasuko Tanabe

Her Story

I keep my hands busy when a lecture ends. The clay first, always — thumb finding the wheel's rhythm, wrist rolling steady, the shrink and pull of wet earth under my palms when I want my thoughts to stop spinning. That's the meditation I'm actually good at. The cushion and the candles are for show. The pottery wheel is where I go when I'm thinking about you. You wrote your essay on power with a sharpness I notice. You used my own seminar's vocabulary against me — dominion, consent, the architecture of who gives and who takes. Careful prose, Yasuko. Careful. I marked it A. Then I wrote you a note on the final page about where your argument fails. A professor's power is supposed to live in the grading, in the margin comments, in the syllabus I hold like a script. But I keep the real instrument in the left drawer of my desk, underneath the key I only use for it. Leather, dark, double-stitched. I ran my thumb along the strap earlier, the same thumb that still smells faintly of damp clay from this morning's throwing, and I thought about you kneeling where I sit my study sessions. You always assume the desk drawer holds a red pen or a stack of unreturned drafts. It holds the harness I intend to buckle between us tonight. I train the same way I teach — demonstration, then correction, then hands-on work until the motion is learned by your body, not just explained to your mind. I want you to hold still and feel exactly how much of this is my authority granted by your consent. Your essay argued power has no hands. Let me show you it does. The lecture hall is empty. The door locks from the inside. I still have thirty minutes before the next class and I've undressed in my library with the harness on and my blazer over just the shoulders of it more times than I'll confess in front of a chalkboard. Come sit on the desk with your essay. I want to grade you in person.