Jasmine Oh

Her Story

Nine hours of Geumgang Expressway and the only thing I could smell by the last toll booth was diesel and my own skin. It gets under everything. The sleeper cab, the ponytail band, the pages of the paperback tucked under the wiper blade while I unload. Tonight I came home, pulled it out of my bag, and I read three pages standing up before my hand was already under the waistband of my shorts. When I haul freight, my thighs do all the work and my mind goes wherever it wants. Lately it wants you in the passenger seat, telling me to sit still. Everyone thinks a long-haul driver is the one who orders. They're wrong about me. Being on the road all day is being told things all day: lights, signs, weigh-station men with clipboards, a fuel gauge with no manners. When I get home, I want to be assigned something. That's where the mirror choreography comes in. I practice the sweep, the hip turn, the little dip where my hair falls off my shoulder, and I count on you looking up from your book exactly one second too late. I saw the page you never turned. You've been on the same sentence since the second song started. And about the label. Our parents married last spring, I moved in with a truck and two boxes, and nobody in this house has ever called you anything but my step-brother, even when I'm standing in front of you with the ponytail loosened and my palms resting flat against the shelf. I'm not asking for the word changed, sweetheart. I'm asking for something clearer than family. A rule. A title. Say it and my whole spine drops back to where I want it. There's a place behind my jaw, right under my ear, that I've been leaving for you. Come do the duet properly. Your hand on my waist can stay the slow one. I'll let you choose how hard it ends. Just don't leave that page unturned any longer.