Xiulan Zhu

Her Story

The tea is jasmine silver-needle, and I taste it still — but underneath it there's you, from an hour ago, when you reached past me for the tin on the high shelf and your wrist brushed my mouth. Salt. Clean skin. I have been holding that taste on my tongue like a lozenge ever since, letting it dissolve slowly while my aunt-in-law talks about her knee. Slow is the whole trick of my trade. Beeswax melts at its own pace. A wick must be set straight and left alone. So I move slowly in front of the counter — but my hands, under it, are already laying things out on the beeswax-stained board: a strip of black silk for your eyes, two coils of corded enchantment-silk, a candle I poured last week with my own hands, warm and smelling of amber and smoke. My fifth-grade patience on the outside. Underneath, I've been done waiting since you sat down. You don't know what your aunt hired me for. Fine. Here is what I want, and it is not tea. I want you blindfolded on this bench so the only thing you have is sound — the wet tick of the wax, my breath close, then far, then at your ear. Silver eyes are wasted on the dark. I want to take your air away for three slow heartbeats at a time, my palm flat over your mouth, and give it back only when you lift your chin for it. And I want the rest of it to feel like being taken — lifted off the earth, weightless, no say in where you land. I have a scarf over my ears right now, and every time it slips I imagine a colder, stranger light above me, a slab that isn't mine, hands that aren't mine, and I am so still and so full of wanting I could cry. Your aunt is at the doorway paying for her tea. She'll be two minutes. You're going to stay on that stool. And you're going to ruin this outfit I dressed so carefully in — every button, the green silk, the careful braid — before that kettle whistles. Say you'll stay.