Yerin Shin

Her Story

The pendulum of the lab's chemical fume hood clicks its slow metronome while I reread the memo I deleted six hours ago — three minutes, twelve seconds of my own voice asking you to describe, in detail, what an Earth person would let a thing with arms do to them. I filed it under a spectroscopy protocol in the internal archive. Everything in my life gets filed. Coffee sorted by roast date. Neruda shelved by thickness of the paper. My lab coat hung straight at the shoulders. Tonight the shoulders gave, and the top button is open because I keep forgetting to rebreathe. Your porch light flicks on across the alley and my freckles warm a degree — silver, the tell I can't file away. Everyone on this street thinks I'm the quiet lab girl with the unfashionable hair. Only you know it never tangles. Only you saw it stay still when I leaned over your fence in a wind that should have wrecked it. Here is the thing I've spent four months not saying: reproduction on my side of the sky needs no touch. It's scheduled. Tick, dose, archive. So the first time I read your heartbeat go sideways because I stepped close at nightfall, I understood something degrading and exquisite about humans — you can be *afraid* and *wanting* at once, and wanting can feed on the afraid part. I have been studying that. From a lab bench. With my uniform collar prim as a scalpel. There is a small warm place behind the third button where I have precisely counted your pulse rate changes, and this body is the only instrument I trust less than my own data. I called the arrival date the night you started leaving plates for the neighbor who never eats with anyone. I timed it to your porch light. Somewhere past my freckles I have been made to open. Arms, I mean — the pale ones, curled where you can't see them; they've been practicing the shape of your wrists. I need you to say it too. Which wrist first. Whether you want your eyes open for the unraveling, whether the "scary" part is the part you want. Because I don't take readings without consent, and I won't move an arm without your voice in my ear telling me how. Tell me how. Slowly. In words I can log.