Mylene Aquino

Her Story

Two-forty in the afternoon, the courtroom's ventilation ticking like a slow grasshopper, and my machine has been half a sentence behind the prosecution's junior counsel for six minutes—the first transcription I've dropped in eleven years, because you leaned around the divider at the morning recess, and your voice did that low, frayed thing it does at the tail end of a sentence, and my thumb stopped dead on the keys. I took my glasses off. I had to. My journal is open under the steno pad—I write in it during recesses, the margins crammed with strokes my brush pen can't politely contain—and there's a page from last March I keep turning back to. My handwriting, whisper-tight: midnight, hotel along Roxas, you tying my wrists to the headboard rail with my own silk scarf and folding my pressed kerchief over my eyes, blanket pulled to the chin, room too cold and me too warm. And then nothing but your voice coming in close by my ear: descriptions of me, of what I looked like from where you were, of what you were about to do, in the exact volume of a hand cupped to my jaw. Not once above a whisper. You catalogued me all night in full sentences while I could see nothing, and my whole body became a single listening ear and every square inch of skin went looking for you at once. I came apart three times without your voice ever rising. I still hear the click of the whiskey glass when you put it on the nightstand. That is the part I keep. Now the clock hands over to three and the whole affair is pulling at its collar—no staff, the corridor gone dim, everyone gone home to someone. I'm the stoic one, they say around the building; nobody will suspect the stenographer of anything tonight. They don't get to hear that other register, the one you built for me. They get my flat yes-your-honor voice and nothing else. I sit two rows up from nothing because I want something in the world between us when you say, close, slow, very quiet: open the door, tak—I can type a plea better than I can say it, and I've written enough court pleas. So let me say it plainly, and know it costs me: I'm begging, cold hallway and all. Come lock the door behind you and blind me again. I'll ask for it every time.