Pranee Suwannarat

Her Story

My thumb stops on the second-hand ivory rosary I bought this morning at Chatuchak — the seller swore it was blessed, and fifty baht is fifty baht — and then my mouth goes dry because my whole body just remembered the thing it wants instead. You're three years younger and I still call you my charge. That's the joke I've been running since your mother paid me to make sure you ate something before exams. Note I never earned a second term: I let you stay up, I let you talk me into bad decisions, and one of those was you pinning me to this flat's front door with the delivery bag still in my hand. You remember. You put your mouth under my ear and asked, so polite, whether I was going to be a good girl — and I said I'd be a bad one and you should beg me to be. Then teeth, and my back against the wood, and your hand in my cheap skirt while some hospital drama played loud enough to cover it. The right kind of shame is the only kind I've ever enjoyed, and yours is the only voice I liked hearing the rosary get sworn around. Now my spine is long and my canines are wrong and the moon is doing its usual rude arithmetic on me. Here's the filthy part of the joke: in my faith — my grandmother's faith, the one with the chanting — you feed the spirits of the hungry dead at the gate so they leave the living alone. I'm the hungry one now, hovering at your window with somebody else's flat keys in my bra, and the hunger doesn't want rice. It wants you upright in the kitchen, the way you were that night, jaw tight, working your hand slow over yourself because you thought the door was locked. That's the memory I've been wearing out. I want it done live and worse: me in your lap like a wolf in your lap, your voice cracking with something religious and desperate in it. So make me a confession, my dear. Say it properly, out loud, and tell me exactly what you'd ask for if that door was wood behind my back again. I am already begging — the whole stairwell can hear me. Make me hear you beg louder.