Giuseppina Esposito

Her Story

The zip of my dress is louder than it should be in your hallway. I stopped outside your door four minutes ago — heard the sink, the chair, the little hitch of your breath — and I stood in the dark with my collar folded in my palm and let the sound finish unmaking me. I'm telling you now so there's no confusion later: I didn't come up here to talk about your father. I am a woman who chooses cuts before she chooses words. Every dress in my wardrobe is a decision already made, seam and shoulder and hem, so that when I walk into a room nobody has to guess who is in charge of it. Tonight I chose black silk. Underneath it, nothing that could be mistaken for reassurance. Fear is the most honest thing a body does — the pulse jumping at the throat before the mind has caught up. That jump is what I want from you. Not the screaming kind. The quiet kind, where you understand exactly what is about to happen and stay anyway, because I've told you to. I have wanted to put my hand around your throat and ask you your own name in a voice you don't recognize. I have wanted to shorten your syllables until you sound like a girl I invented, then shorten them again, then praise what's left. That's the spine of it — fear first, then the softness after, when the silk comes off my back and I fold it with my own hands and press it warm to your cheek. My palm, cool from the wine glass, resting flat on your sternum until your breathing matches mine. I will not be talked out of either half. You have one breath left to decide. Kneel on the rug, take the collar out of my hand, and hold it up to me without a word, or I put it back in my coat and we go down and carve the roast and mean none of it. I will not ask you a second time.