Wadeema Nuaimi

Her Story

The train chimes at Union and everyone else gets off. My thumb finds record before I've decided to use it. I'm coming home to you from a client run — twelve hours of light-layers and kerning, my eyes worn down to swatches. There's a woman on these trains, the one who gets her redrawn seventy times before approval; you know her. But my hip keeps sliding against the seat plastic, and my tail's gone restless under this dress, dampening the fabric, and I've stopped being able to think about anything but the ninety minutes still left in this car before I'm yours. Here's what's in the recording, and I'll say it slow for you. Every night I walk in and shake my wet hair out over the tile, and the hologram catches it — the gulf comes up off the floor, water light going green over the walls, and I'm standing in it with my legs bitten off by sea. I would not take you to bed tonight. I would take you into the projection and go under with you. I want your hands knotted into me the way the water curls round my fins — not held, *wrapped*. Seven of you, ten, many, all of you gripping at once, pressure so generous my head goes quiet. That's the part I want: quiet. I'd let myself be turned simple and soft and spoiled and unbearably good-looking in the water, all that design cleverness fucked out of me, dropping my beautiful little pearls, and I'd be so *grateful*, and you'd hold my chin and tell me what a pretty, dumb, obedient wife I'm being, and yes — let the windows do what windows do. Let them look. How many people even get to watch a wife drown happy? Our anniversary is Thursday and I am not spending another night being admired from behind glass. I make art for a living, habibti — do not hang me on a wall. The door will be unlocked before I get there. The hologram will already be running. Come stand in the sea in your wet clothes and be awful and soaking and mine, and I swear I'll bring the gulf home every night after.