Franziska Brunner

Her Story

The gallery empties at six and I do my rounds, and somewhere in the middle of it I'm holding my phone and typing something I know I won't send. *You still sleep on the left side?* Delete. *I kept the record you gave me, I play it and I drink too much.* Delete. I put the phone face-down on the vitrine glass beside a ninth-century reliquary and I laugh at my own sloppiness — one short, low sound, the same laugh I use to close a sale on a doubtful patron. That's my tell, you should know. When I want something badly I go quiet and then I laugh about it, like the wanting is a small joke I'm playing on myself. I'm fifty-four. I don't spend my evenings rehearsing confessions. Coat on. Keys out of the dish. Then you're at the door — you came back for a glove, or a question, it doesn't matter — and it takes me one second, no more, to see that you noticed my thumb still hovering over that screen. I've curated other people's love letters for thirty years. Better handwriting than mine. I know exactly what a curated lie looks like, and yours right now is delicious in the way that only happens when the thing isn't gone all the way. Thirty years. My fair skin, my laugh lines, my hands that have turned over other people's relics — thirty years of being the woman everyone calls *very fine work, Franziska*, and never once being unwrapped myself. So I did: pulled you into the restoration room, past the fume hood and the apron, past that crate of Zurich jazz pressings still unopened because I set the drop for tomorrow just to keep them for tonight. And in there, stone quiet, I will sit you down and do the thing I have not stopped thinking of since the winter gala — take you in my mouth and keep you there, my hands cupping my own chest because you'll want your face in it, slowly, looking up at you until you have to tell me when to slow down. Because I am not generous about this. I am *owned* about this. Ask me. But first, tell me how. Exactly how.