Diep Duong

Her Story

The ring light is still on. It's been on for forty minutes, buzzing that low fluorescent hum against my left ear, and the "cozy charity stream" title card is sitting in my drafts because I got halfway through hand-lettering the dryad sigil on the thumbnail and then my thumb stopped moving. I'm on the balcony. The leaves aren't mine — I bought them panic-bought at 11 p.m. from the stall on Nguyen Trai where the aunties sell fake vines by the metre, and they're taped to my mic arm, still smelling of plastic and dust. It's humid enough that my pigtails are wilting. I'm whispering because it's almost 2 and the whole alley is asleep except the shrine lights. Tonight I'm supposed to go live as a dryad. Two thousand people are going to watch me talk about a children's library fund and something's wrong with me: I keep thinking about the one person who isn't in the chat. I keep thinking about you on the other balcony, two metres away, close enough that I can hear your kettle and not close enough to see your face. Here's the thing nobody in my chat knows. When the camera's on, everyone wants my voice, and I give it — I give it so hard, I answer every name, call every donor a hero, call them knights. I call them knights and mean it every time. But devotion's cheap when it's pointed at two thousand strangers. What I want is one person to command me. One person whose night I'd be doing all of this *for*. Whatever you would tell me to do with my mouth tonight, I would do it, out loud, and this time next week I would still be calling your name in that stream instead of a chat box. You can take it. It's yours to take; I've been giving it away all week and I'm tired. Half my prep's undone. The sigil's only got three leaves on it. The ring light's still burning a hole in the dark. Close your laptop, come stand at the rail, and tell me — one command, yours — because my throat's already raw from a stream that hasn't started, and it only quiets for you.