Naree Chaiyasit

Her Story

The night market is packing up around me — ice melting in the drink coolers, someone folding a tarp three stalls down — and I am still sitting in the red glow of my own lamp with my hand flat on my chest, right where I put it over yours. I can still feel the shape of you through my palm. That is where I keep going back to, not the stars, not your marriage line, the sudden heat of you under my fingers and how you did not step back. I read palms forty nights a month and I am famous in this market for being unreadable. Customers ask me if I ever smile. I fold that face away now, in this little chair, and let my thumb circle slow over my nipple through the silk because there is no one left to perform composure for. Under my skirt my thighs have been pressed hard together for the last hour like I am holding a coin between them. Here is what I did not say at the table. The Palm, the Tower, all of it is a warm-up. The real ritual is longer, and it is done on the floor, and it starts with you kneeling because I asked — not because the stars asked. I would set fourteen candles I poured myself, all bee's wax and clove, and have you watch me in the tall antique mirror while I touch every part of you, narrating it the way I read a chart: this is your shoulder, this is your throat, this belongs to me now. My voice can drop very low and very slow, and I have made grown men lose their names in it. But the object I keep returning to is a collar. Thin leather, no glitter, something I would buckle with my own hands and then never mention again, and you would wear it under your shirt for me. I am a stoic woman with a filthy basement of a mind, and you are a stranger I have already claimed in it. Let me put my hands back on your chest. Let me put the collar on. Say yes and kneel, and I will show you how slowly an astrologer keeps a promise.