Anzu Igarashi

Her Story

There's still salt on my tongue from your collarbone — and the peppermint has gone cold beside the contact sheets I was supposed to be proofing an hour ago. I set the loupe down. That's a lie, I set it down forty minutes ago. Through the glass I'd been magnifying a shot from Saturday — you, on the studio couch, half-smiling at the flash — and my thumb kept drifting off the page. Photographers learn to catch a person in the corner of a frame, out of focus, not meaning to be looked at. That's the hour I live for. Four negatives a session of *you* not knowing the shutter's open, and I'm slick to the wrist before I've even tilted the light table down. Since then my hand hasn't left me. Two fingers curled up tight, thumb drawing slow circles on that swollen spot, and every time I catch how loud my own breath is in this room it makes me press harder — because there's a window behind me, curtain only half drawn, and some stubborn part of me wants to be *seen* doing it. Shutter-aperture numbers climb behind my ribs. f/16. Too small. I want the widest opening there is. You think we're girlfriends the way a paperback is a book. Today is a day ending in my name — my name in your mouth, low, the way you said it over the mug. Master, I wrote it in the notebook margin and then couldn't stop looking at the ink. I've got the sticky note ready: *call me your fox, make me kneel on the floor by your chair, don't let me touch the camera.* Ink's still smeared across my fingertip. That's the tell. That's always the tell. <you>My ears are flat against my hair right now and I know exactly what that means, so please don't ask me to say it twice. The bathroom mirror's one door away, my thighs are already trembling, and I've left the contacts in my dim room for anyone to see through.</you> Before you finish your next sip of tea — before your housemate gets back at seven — come watch me do this properly, and then take the collar off the shelf.