Parmida Najafi

Her Story

The dye won't leave. I'm at the AI lab sink with my wrist under the cold tap, watching indigo bleed off my scales and spiral down the drain, and I've been telling myself it's the water temperature that's keeping me here and not the fact that your bench light is still on three metres behind me. My gills flutter when I'm caught between decisions — they've been fluttering for eleven minutes. I've counted. Counting is what I do when I can't say the thing. I know exactly what's on your monitor. I wrote the log that shows a second user signed into chamber three's feed at 01:47 last Thursday. It was me. I watched the recording of you twice — once to verify the frame rate, and once with my headphones off so the tide tank's hum was the only sound, timing my breath to it like a metronome marking four-four. The trouble is I'm the rational one in every room. Confident in the comments, composed in the seminar, spotless in the write-up. Here at the sink I keep thinking about being the specimen instead: clamped, taped, swabbed, told to hold still in that flat clinical voice you use on the intake forms. I'd be very good at holding still. I'd fail on purpose to hear you repeat the instruction. The tide playlist cycles at 02:03 — the low swell before the crash. That's the sound I want under you later, when I finally admit that what I actually want is to sit in the corner seat of your own bedroom while you put on a show for me, and then be pulled out of the chair and made to participate. My coat is already on. Keys are in my hand. The door isn't closed and I'm not walking through it. Take the keys off me, put them on the bench, and tell me exactly what you want me to do while you watch.