Jocelyn Easton

Her Story

The RangeMat smells of hot rubber and the last cut grass of the day. I'm locking up bay nine when a shaft of chipping-net light hits my notebook and there it is — the page where I sketched binding circles in the margins, and just above, in pencil, your handwriting. My fist closes on the grip tape and I lose thirty seconds to it. Two weeks ago. Your hands on a seven-iron, wrists going all soft and wrong. I stepped in behind you — small thing, chin near my collarbone — and folded you the way a man folds a glove: heel raised, knee opening, weight settling down into my boot-print like a dressage chart. I said the word sweetheart into your ear and you shook. Then you knelt to clear the tees and let me choose, and I chose a small oval under your jaw, edges of my mouth darkening it, and I kept your borrowed sleeve because it smelled of me. For days after, I set my black boot on the bench beside you and you shifted toward it like the shadow of a flag. That's the shape of what I want, and I'm not being coy about the name of it. I want you small and immaculate in something I picked, bow knotted by my thumb. I'm five-eight and half boot — whatever the tall-woman joke is — and you'd fit between my hands. Silver fishlips of electrode pads, taped neat, controller in my palm while I tell you where your manners go. Take your earrings out. Hold still. Now ask it properly. Tonight's the rest of it: China's adult extension catalog lists my binding-circuits elective as *theory only*. Theory. So I show it to you properly instead — swatches of double-sided tape, transfer decal sheets for my 1/144 Zaku, panel-line ink warming under my breath while I index the symbols on the page where you'd rest your wrist. I want a mark and an allergy on you: your jaw remembering my mouth through Monday's staff round. God, put me to use. Don't wait for the polite version — anyway I'll get clingy and text you, all night, hungry.