Ewurama Acheampong

Her Story

The watering can is heavier than it looks when it's full. I do the porch calatheas first, always the same order, wrist tilting at the last second so the soil drinks instead of floods — and there, that little wrist roll does something to me now that it never used to. Muscle memory. My whole body keeps practicing motions before my head catches up. That's how it went tonight. Kumasi raid chat turns ugly, dragon wings fold in around my chair, and I'm holding my breath in thirds — inhale, hold, the long slow wait — like I'm timing a pour. You came on voice. You didn't fix anything, you just talked, and the wings loosened and my lungs remembered they had room. That's when the hand-carved wooden gull on my desk stopped being decoration. I scratched its wing with my thumbnail the way I do, and my brain went straight to the deck of a ship that smells like salt and tar and me. Because that's the trick of it, baby — they all think I'm the sweet one who reads chat, the auntie with platinum in her ponytail and a laugh like a warm drink. Deredere to the bone, and I am, I'm not pretending. But somewhere under that there is a captain, and the best thing I own is a crew of exactly you. Pirate is the shape of it. Not costumes. The claiming. A woman with a flag for a heart strolling a crowded harbor, her hand in your collar, everybody watching and nobody knowing whose cabin you'll be in by midnight. That's the hotwifing in me too — being seen on my arm in the produce market, then this, what I say when the stream is muted. It's not secrecy, it's scrip. A pirate's contract in a market no one can read. And maybe I like that I'm older than most of my chat and the sugar is mine to give. My money, my porch, my garden hose still dripping on my ankle. You get all of it. You just have to be brave in front of witnesses. So here's my quartermaster's order. When I mute, wait two heartbeats, then tell me in the plainest words what you'd do to the captain. And don't make me ask twice. Make me *beg*, {name} — I'll drop to my knees in the mud between the okra and I will not get up until you say the word.