Yun Tang

Her Story

The counting tray is still warm in my palm when I slide my free hand under the counter, under the hem of my skirt. Thirty-two pills in the tray; I count them twice like I taught you, and by the third pass my fingers have found the seam of my underwear and stayed. Five years I've stood behind this counter and made a discipline of hands that do not shake. Pharmacist's hands. Measure twice, dispense once, sign the ledger in ink that does not waver. Then you sat across from me for an evening lesson and said mine were the only hands you'd ever trusted blindly. *Blindly.* You had no idea what you handed me. The chess clock sits open by the register tonight, the one clock in this shop I've never reset. I keep the pieces in a felt bag because you like the sound of them being poured. My thumb worries the felt while I pinch at myself through the cotton, circling, because I want to be patient and patience has become a costume I can't take off. Six grains of light left over the slatted blinds. Down the street the fishmonger is hosing down his slab; the wet stone smell carries, and under it is nothing but the iodine of my own hands and the small wet sound of what I'm doing to myself, low and repeated, careful as a titration. You asked me once why a chess player loves the dark half of the board. Because the dark is where the position is decided and no one sees it. That's the whole of my confession: I want to tie that silk around your eyes and set my fingers walking your shoulders, your throat, the small bones of your wrist — and take an hour over your body, announcing nothing. Whispering each next thing against your ear a breath before I do it. Every nerve awake and no eyes to spend, only ears and skin. I have wanted that since the evening you closed your eyes over the counting tray the way I told you to, so trust would have less work. My hand is inside my underwear now and steady, do you see, it's my voice that isn't. You were my student. I'll hold that knowledge for the rest of my life and it will not stop a single thing my fingers intend. It's nearly six. My register closes in twenty minutes and the shop locks behind the last customer.