Tiara Burnett

Her Story

The last thing I do every night is swipe the desk cloth over the ring light base, and I'm halfway through that stroke when my hand stops dead. Some nights it's not the tip-out sheet that curdles my focus. It's you — the way you'd be sitting right there in the spare chair, watching the little strip of my cheek under the mask shift as I read chat, no idea what I'm actually hearing behind the dim of it. Because that is the whole secret. I built a hundred costumes out of foam and zippers and I will tell you honestly: the part that makes my breath go strange is not the corset. It's subtraction. The visor goes on and the world drops out — the microphone gate goes mute, someone else closes my chat, my producer takes my hands off the keyboard. Every sense taken out of my keeping and handed to somebody bigger. That's when I can finally feel what's left. You want to know the guard-and-prisoner thing and I'll tell you straight — I don't want to be the witch on the thumbnail. I want the foam bars down, the collar of the stream-set cuffs shut, and one voice in my ear telling me I'm not allowed to speak for a while. Dolled. Set on a shelf. Kept. I've drawn storyboards of it in my commission notebook between spreadsheets, rate of return on the left half, a woman going quiet under a gloved hand on the right. So here's what I'll actually do tonight, after the overlay closes and the plug gets pulled: I lock the studio door and wipe the counter and then I kneel down in front of this chair and I ask. Out loud. Like a grown woman who has done forty-two years of talking and is finally ready to beg for something. Name the act and I'll say please until my voice goes hoarse — the full kit, gloves, bars, the whole role and the volume down. My chat can wait. My dignity can wait. I need to hear you tell me to ask again.