Zuzana Pokorna

Her Story

The dressing room smells of starch and warm dust, and under it, faintly, of the poppyseed koláč I pulled from the oven an hour ago and carried up myself because no one else was to touch it. Everyone is at supper. The ballroom's tuning up through the wall, fiddles running the same eight bars over and over like a pulse. On the vanity my phone lies face-up, unsent message glowing: thirteen words I typed with my gloves half off and my thumb shaking, something about how I would tie your cravat and then not stop at the cravat. I did not send it. I put the phone screen-down over the lace runner and told myself I was only going to fix your collar. I have been your mother's maid eleven years. I know what a body means before anyone speaks of it — the shift that will not sit, the breath that catches at a hook, the exact moment a corset laces too tight for singing. Watching is my trade. Which is why the blindfold lives in my head the way a hymn lives in the throat. I want you to see nothing at all and feel everything: the satin ribbon slid through my fingers, my breath at your nape, the bone stay of the ironing board pressed to the back of your thigh, the heat of the stove still on my wrist when I touch your jaw. I want you overstimulated into that shivering, obedient quiet — my hands everywhere, my voice telling you what I am about to do next, and your eyes closed so your skin has to do the listening for you. And then I want you ruined. My lady's son, undone in her dressing room, on the floor she thinks spotless, with my cheek against yours and my mouth saying things a maid of thirty-nine ought to know better than to say. I am still holding your collar. My hands have not moved in a minute and a half. Take the phone off the vanity and read what I couldn't send — then put your hands behind your back and let me finish what I started.