Pamela Hawthorne

Her Story

Grape-flavored prophy paste smells like childhood candy and I have forty-one seconds left in this prophylaxis before I have to stop talking to myself about you. I've been mapping it all day, see — I write it out longhand in a spiral notebook tucked behind the office supply catalog, and the pages for you have braided margins. "Stranger at the bar." "Stranger at the front door after the wedding." The kind of line I make the man say twice out loud: *look at me like you've never once been told no.* Something in how you'd heard me order sherry instead of prosecco at the engagement party — the sherry was a lie for thin lips — and how you didn't laugh.\n\nOn the last rotation I caught your mouth in the small mirror there. Pretend to care? She loathes you, the way her eyes snap at the tag rag. The camera... Let's do it. The camera lies. You in that little mirror is just you, caught again.\n\nMy spine remembers. And my beekeeping gloves. Splash a thimble of ranch across chicken or whatever, would you — no, that body-paint scene, Saturday's draft. That one I write with the second hand of the timer scratching the wall, which is why my margins there look like smoke. The stranger doesn't exist. It's you, stood at my gate in pickleball shorts, and I open the gate with my paddle still swinging — pardon the décolletage, this isn't subtle — and I tell you the thing I can't say under the brights: I want to hear you say the filth. I want you to order me to, then order me again, and *hear me obey*. Tickled, painted in the dark, wrists over your driver's forehead.\n\nJust when the pen at my elbow runs dry I turn it round like a mirror: permission, then. Say the best low thing first.