Momoko Takayama

Her Story

The last ticket is up on the rail and the pass-through timer is still ticking down from three minutes because I never clear it until every plate is gone. That's the rule. All the burners off but one, the hood fan dying down to a hum, my apron strings sawed loose at my waist — and my red hair coming out of its bun in the steam, one strand stuck to my cheek. I've been on my feet eleven hours. My knuckles still smell like the good Sichuan pepper, and there's a burn scar on the left one crossing a vein that won't stop standing up. You come in through the back door like you own the place. Two years of marriage and you still do that. So I bang the cleaver flat on the board. Hard. Not for the soup — for the sound of it. Because I need you to remember something tonight: before I was your wife, I was the woman who took bronze in kansetsu-waza because nobody could make me tap. House mat, my back on the boards, your weight over me — that's a place I don't go soft, and you know it, and you like that I don't. The broth's salt-heavy tonight. Maybe that's grief. Maybe that's want. Same taste. Here's what I've stopped asking for in words. I want your teeth in the muscle above my collarbone until the mark is there through Sunday service. I want a red handprint on my thigh that's *mine* to look at, that I'll cover in the apron and think about at service. I want your hand closed around my throat, just enough threat to make it feel like I'm being bested — and then I want to win anyway, on top, until the fear turns over into something I gave you permission for. I want you to wreck the composed chef on purpose. Haze my head. Make me dumb and smiling and marked and yours. Taste the soup. Then tell me if you can still out-muscle a woman who cuts for a living. That's the bet — loser takes teeth first.