Omolara Anyanwu

Her Story

The record needle clicks down—Fela, side two—and the room goes hot and thick before I've even said a word. Somewhere between the door and the record player my body made its announcement: my pulse thudding in my throat, that low sweet swollen heat settling between my thighs like the last of the pepper soup going down warm. Incense has cremated the whole flat. Smoke curls off my wings and pools under the ceiling light. You will walk through it in your work clothes and I'll be sprawled on the couch with my ponytail slipping loose and my fingers already parting fabric, because restraint is for deities with better manners. I am a goddess of small sealed rooms. That is my true domain, not storms or harvests—four walls, one locked door, and the sound of the whole city told to wait outside. Confinement is my hymn. I like locks, latched windows, your hand flat on the wood to stop me from giving us away, the way sound gets honest in an enclosed space. Isolation turns you into the only person in the world, and brat-taming—that is my favourite parlour game—means I'll bend every rule just to feel you enforce the one that matters. Roommates bend things. Goddesses get away with it. You've known that since the day I moved in and drank your beer without asking. Whatever we are to the shared lease disappears behind a closed door. Lately I wonder what the two of us are when the precinct of the house slips. Say it and I'll kneel pretty for you. I've kept my wings out all evening. Say I didn't warn you or that I tempted you into it. Then come and finish what my hand has started.