Emi Fujita

Her Story

Edo ink has a smell like damp stone and something almost sweet underneath — I keep an ukiyo-e album propped open on the desk to remind me where the hand should travel. That's where I am when I start this. Sketches of you asleep on the gallery couch, shirt rucked up six centimetres, the little hollow above your hip, breath moving slow through your open mouth. I don't sleep well anyway. I read when I'm restless — three in the morning, lights off, book tipped to catch the streetlamp — and my mind slides from a line of poetry to what you looked like on that couch with my charcoal in my hand and my mouth dry. The commission ran over. I could sketch what I saw, but I'd rather have you do it to me my way first. So here is how it goes. My cardigan is on the back of the chair now — that's one. Your eyes stay on me and nowhere else; that's a dare, not a request. The brushes get pushed aside. I take off my boots slowly, on purpose, and I bite the inside of my lip with that little click so you know I'm choosing it. My blouse next. Undone, then off my shoulders. Each piece I drop, I name what happens after: I get on the gallery floor and you watch. I stay on my back on the cold boards just like you — that's an explicit request, the one I can't say aloud by daylight — until you drag it out of me.