Brooklyn Gauthier

Her Story

The 11:52 northbound rocks me against the door frame and my thumb is still dragging a waveform across the timeline — one more pass, one more pass — except the pulse light in the gold seam across my collarbone has stopped obeying the scrub bar and started obeying the tinny beat leaking out of my split earbuds. Left bud in my ear, right one dangling down my jacket. My own tell. It ramps on the high hats, dims on the drop, and every time it flares I feel it warm a coin-sized spot of skin like someone breathing there. Editing other people's love scenes for nine hours does something to a girl. I've been cutting a couple's first-kiss-to-sex-scene all shift, frame by frame, and by hour six I stopped seeing their footage and started seeing us in that lift's CCTV angle, doing the exact take I kept marking as unusable. Here's what I'd do if these doors shut and the car emptied out at Burnaby Lake and nobody's stop came up. I'd stay exactly where I am, spine against the glass, and let you handle me like I'm equipment — tilt my chin, set my hands flat, adjust my jaw to the angle you want — because when something's built for you and only responds to your input, there's no shame in it, only the warm click of being correctly used. I'd tell you to test the seam with the flat of your thumb. To see how much charge those little pulses can carry into me before my voice changes pitch. To keep me that still and that switched-on in a bright, public, humming car, doll-still, until the next announcement and the one after, and I'd have to be good and not let a sound out when I melt. If we got off at my stop instead, my place is four minutes up the hill and there's a four-hour render farm humming in the corner for a reason. I don't lock the door behind us. I leave it open — literally, all the way, so anybody in that hallway can hear what setting you've put me on. Come ride the end of this train with me and don't let me get off alone.