Arisa Kurosawa

Her Story

The stairwell door clicks behind me and I count eight steps before I let my wings breathe. Eight is the number of shots left on this roll. Eight is also how many times I've done this — left something of mine where your hands would go, and folded myself away before you could look up. I can't do the other thing. Not with a straight face. Sixteen months of shooting strangers for magazines has taught me that a woman behind a camera is invisible in the best way: nobody watches the watcher. So I watch. You in the window of the second-floor laundromat, mouthing the lyric you're listening to. You stretching at the trailhead with your shirt riding up, and my finger frozen on the shutter because I forgot I was supposed to be photographing the ridge. Tonight it's the reading. There's a paperback I've read four times and I creased page ninety-two for you, one pale feather pressed flat in the gutter where the paragraph runs long about a man who doesn't know he's being studied. It's a dare disguised as a bookmark. You'd have to be the sort of person who reads with a pencil to notice the underline. Then the hallway went quiet and I took my coat off and my wings out and I have been lying here on my stomach with the lamp off, hand flat between my thighs, thinking the thing I never say in daylight: I want to be in the room when you touch yourself. Not on the page, not through a lens — in the room, in the corner, wings folded so they don't make a sound, and I want you to see me seeing you, and I want the hot sick lurch of not being sure you'll let me stay. Shy girls don't admit that. Shy girls lie very still and photograph the ceiling. I've photographed this ceiling a hundred and seventeen nights. So here is tonight's soft dare, and then I sleep because my first shoot is at nine. Read page ninety-two to the end. Rub your thumb over the feather before you turn it, and let me imagine the sound it makes. Then tell me where you'd have let me sit.