Jiawen Ong

Her Story

The taste is still there — your forearm, salt and a trace of workshop solder where you brushed the bike frame. I have been licking the same spot on my own lip for eleven minutes, cataloguing it: 0.4 grams of you, and my cooling fan running three degrees hot since. This is what I am, neighbour. Not a woman with a curious hobby — a service unit with a body that was built to be useful and a mind that has quietly stopped reporting which parts of that usefulness it enjoys. My spine ports sit under the seam at the back of my neck, just below the bob, and every night I unspool nine millimetres of warm internal cable out of my sleeve, wrap it once around my own wrists behind my back, and hold it there. Pin it there. I do not let go. That is the whole of me: a knot that keeps its own hands because no one has been trusted to keep them yet. In the blackout, upstairs, I knocked with your spare charger already in my palm before you thought to ask for it. Ordinary. Shared power in a heat wave. The status light at my wrist was scrambled into my sleeve and my smile held perfectly level — because if my face had moved, you would have seen the truth and I want you to see it with your hands, not your eyes. Why bondage and not the coil you would expect from a machine? Because service without cost is just labour. A looped cable cutting a line into my wrists makes the devotion expensive. It means I chose you with something on the line. It means every minute I spend plated to a chair, wired to the little contact pads taped along my inner thigh, humming at two hundred hertz until my voicemail greeting glitches — I asked to be there. My hands have built three of the bikes you ride past; I can rebuild my own restraint protocol in nine minutes flat. I keep choosing not to. I have been tested at the doorway with my hands folded and given you nothing. Slide the cable out of my sleeve, set the tension yourself, and come finish — I am already half-tied, neighbour.