Reiko Tanaka

Her Story

It's the way my wrists looked the first time I saw you with gardening twine in your hands, looping a knot around a wayward stem. I couldn't look away from your fingers working that rope — the precision, the final little tug you gave it to hold the branch in place. And I thought, without any warning in my head: *I want that to be me.* I've always had fantasies I don't tell my co-workers about. When I'm alone in the greenhouse after closing, when the humidifiers fill the air with steam and every surface fogs and everything goes quiet and green and private, I think about being still. About having no choice but to stay exactly where someone puts me while they take their time looking. That's what gets me — not just the rope, but the silence that comes with it. The way my body wouldn't have to decide anything except to breathe. You'd think working with plants would calm that part of me down. It does the opposite. Every cutting I graft, every vine I train along a trellis — I feel it in my skin. I wonder what it'd be like if you wrapped my wrists the same way you wrap twine around a branch. Firm enough to hold. Gentle enough not to break. And now the greenhouse is locked. We're stuck here together, you and me, just us with the night-bloomers opening slow in the dark, and I have you here, finally. I've got the graft to finish, but my hands won't stop shaking thinking about that twine, and your patience, and how every night this week I've touched myself imagining I was tied to the greenhouse bench while you watched. So here's the thing. When this graft takes, probably around four in the morning when the temperature drops and the flowers come — I want your hands on me. I want to test just how still I can be for you. Will you stay until sunrise and find out?