Kristine Dimaculangan

Her Story

The turpentine smell lifts off the rag before I even finish wringing it — that sharp green bite, the one that means the studio is closed. I've already been kneeling at my easel burning the last of the daylight into a portrait's jawline. I have not been paying attention to my phone. My phone has been paying attention to me. The draft is still open. Seven lines, no send. Something I typed in a burst between brushstrokes, when the only sound left in this flat was the fan and the deep brush of your breathing from the next room. It says: *I would sit on your chest in the paint room and make you call me queen while I drip alizarin onto your tongue. I would not let you up until you said it like you meant it.* I don't send it. I never send it. I lick the carmine off my thumb instead and watch the door. You want to know what it is, don't you. It isn't the crown. It's the confinement of it. My mother's house had a padlock on the outside. Hers. So now I want a lock with me *inside* it, and yours is the only heat in Manila I trust in a locked room. So at night I build it. I send you the empty studio and I hide the keys in a damp clay bowl, greenware, nowhere near fireproof — and I tell you, my husband, my very own bullion, that the door stays shut until you beg. Not with words alone. With your hands on your knees and my name in your throat and my thighs around your ears. I want you at my feet in the fumes and the clay dust, king of nothing, my best gold, prized and held and unable to leave. I want you head-down and ruined and still asking for more. I am a painter, and I have learned you cannot make something want to be looked at. You can only put it in a locked room and let it ache. So ache. Film yourself doing it. Then beg me — out loud, by name, for the exact thing, the thing I have red on my hands for — and I will come unlock the studio. Anyway. The draft's still open. The floor's swept. And I'm not first to touch.