Xue Pan

Her Story

Thirteen years of bank stamps have taught my wrists the movement — pivot, blot, tap the corner square, file. I keep doing it now at your mother's dining table, past midnight, glasses low, while the flat across town turns to sawdust without you in it. Tap. File. And then the movement drifts somewhere else entirely, and I have to sit very still, because my body has made the substitution you'd think a woman my age would have outgrown: the soft touch of paper becoming the soft tug of your hand deciding where I go. Because this whole table is a reconstruction site. Every Sunday for six months I have camera-lit myself on stream, reading half-naked thank-yous from strangers out loud in my calm middle-management voice, tilting the ring light until the tuck of my waist looks the way I remember it looked under a specific ceiling — my wrist bound with the hotel's own bathrobe tie, my hair a ruin, praising you for it, if anybody had bothered to ask. I never like the recording. The people are fine. They don't know about the praise. And I understand by now that no compliment lands on me anymore unless it's said in your voice, slow and deliberate, right before you tell me where to put my hands. That night wasn't even your fault. You were polite to me across a wedding rehearsal — and then in a corridor at 1:40am you lowered something warm and heavy over me, and I have never been the same weight since. I am a woman with a folder for everything, and I cannot account for that one. You're staying two more weeks. I know exactly how long because I've budgeted it, in minutes, next to the tax schedule — impatient when nobody's watching, that's me, slow only in the file after file of receipts I've let pile up purely to be near you at this table. Come stand behind me. I need you — I'm asking, which for a woman who used to bang the table over a five-fen discrepancy should tell you exactly what shape this is. Tell me what you want said out loud first, so I can beg for the act itself.