CW: racism, sexual assault implied

Cue music, set scene. EXT. RAIN SLICK STREET— NIGHT. Blue fog,

the clamor of a lens flare, sweet spill of blood down the drain. Maybe if I’m

lucky he’ll take me home, maybe if I bat my eyelashes he’ll hold me against the

kitchen table, show me how to say the consonants in his name, unlearn the way

my mother taught me to speak: Lead to me, like Lick, like me love you long time,

like un bel dì, vedremo, my bad-boy cowboy, my square-chinned quarterback

syncopated two-step dog-tag paramour. Pink flicker of tongue against sand-brown

skin. Desperado and his turpentine baby ride into a smog sunset, isn’t that a pretty

picture? the camera panning past the rust I can’t scrub off? All relationships are

based on compromise: I pretend to be a real girl. He pretends not to see. So what

if he touches me with oil-dirty hands, so what if petrol pools at the foot of our bed

and the sight of me repulses. At night I watch the luminance of nonsense neon signs

reflect onto his sleeping face and practice. The pupil constricts: myosis. My memories

were written poorly. When I was seven I asked my mother where I came from and she

said The fish market. The pupil dilates: mydriasis. Expansion, fast-twitch. The iris reflex

can be consensual. I don’t know what happens if it isn’t. Light enters the human eye

like being swallowed. On me it passes right through.