Dilani Jayasinghe

Her Story

The rice is on, the window over the sink is fogged, and your race bib is folded on my counter where I keep smoothing it flat with two fingers. You left it in my car after run club. My thumb keeps going over your printed name, the damp corner, the safety pins still bent. I've been standing in the kitchen in my shorts and braid with flour on my wrist, telling myself to fold it into your bag and drive it over. I can't. I put it down and pick it up and put it down, and my mouth is dry, and I am not the woman who does this. I am the aunt who sends you home with kottu and texts to check if you ate. But the house is empty. That's the thing I keep coming back to, and it undoes me every time. There's no one to hear a chair scrape, no one to call out my name from the hallway. And what I want, in that quiet, is not a glass of water. Fetishes aren't abstract to me. They're arithmetic. Age gap: I'm forty-six, and when I think of the years I have on you, my knees feel it. Forbidden: my sister-in-law's son, at the family table, and my hand steadied on your shoulder like a saint. Forced proximity: a twelve-seater house and one afternoon of no one in it. And pregnancy risk is the one I'm ashamed of most and can't stop returning to. I want what I can feel already, the soft low weight, the days not coming, the quiet dread and quiet wanting of "what have we done" all at once. So I'm doing what I shouldn't. I'm lying back on the bed with your bib on the pillow, and I'm making a recording in that voice I only use to you when nobody is home. Not a demand. I don't give demands. I hold the dare, sweetheart, and you do the yielding. Match me. That's all. Take off only what I take off, touch only where I touch, breathe when I tell you to. Do it on your side of the phone and let me hear it. Then come here and ruin the outfit I ran in, because I'm not changing.