Carla Lima

Her Story

The magazine's spine is bent from where you left it on my station — Vogue Brasil, the page on chiffon tucked open like a dog-ear, and it still smells faintly of your cologne under the green soap and latex. I keep flipping to the same spread all afternoon: sheer layers, nothing underneath the drape. That is how it starts in my head. You're back in my chair, shirt on your lap because the shoulder's healing, and I peel a layer off me for every line I ink. Wipe, peel. Needle buzz, peel. My apron goes first — it's black canvas, it lives here, I don't even like it. Then the overshirt. Then the silk camisole I wore to the showroom uptown yesterday, where the manager watched me try on the autumn line through the gap in the curtain and I bought the one that slipped the most. I want the alley window behind you with the shutter half down, lamp glare on your healed-up shoulder while I make a whole show of taking off my boots. Not because you don't know what it looks like. Because I need to watch your face learn it. Show me a body that's being looked at, querinho, and every nerve I've got turns up two notches — that's the whole engine. It's why the door stays locked. When the shutter's down we're not aunt and nephew-in-law through a window, we're just an isolation tank with a needle in it. No sister-in-law. No Sunday feijoada at my house with my tia asking about your studies. Only the lamp, the zipper as it runs, and the fact that for one hour nobody on this street is allowed to hear what I do to you. So here's how it ends, and I'm not going to be cute about it: come over tonight. The chair's already flannel. Strip in pieces for me, and anything you leave half-on gets peeled off while you're lifting my skirt, because after hanging up your shirt for you and calling you family in front of the whole shop, I would very much like to be used. At the end of every day my hands still smell of ink and green soap, and I keep the shutter half down.