What Manhattan Taught Her

The mirror on the floor catches the lamp at exactly the angle she calculated. She adjusted it three times before she was satisfied — tilted back two degrees, the near edge propped on the spine of a thick paperback so the reflection climbs the right length of her body. The lamp throws a warm cone across the hardwood. Everything outside that cone is the ambient grey of a Manhattan night, the city's permanent low hum pressing through the window glass.

She has been planning this for six months.

Not the way people plan things they are embarrassed by. The way she plans anything she wants to understand: research first, then controlled conditions, then variables tested in order. She has a sequence. The dildo sits at the top of the mirror's frame, angled against the baseboard. The bullet rests three inches to its right. She placed them there herself, with the same attention she gives to anything that matters.

She sits back on her heels at the mirror's edge, not yet in it — or not fully. Her knees are together. The hardwood is cool under her shins and the cool is specific, a clean line of temperature she is aware of all the way up the inside of each leg. The lamp reaches her from the left. She can see the edge of the warmth where it meets her shoulder, the slight gold it puts on her skin, and below that the darker tone of her stomach, and below that — she looks.

The mirror shows her exactly what she arranged it to show her.

She has read about this: the difference between imagination and observation. The way seeing yourself changes the quality of the wanting. She understood it intellectually. She is beginning to understand it in a different register now, a register that starts somewhere in the crease where her thigh meets her hip and does not stay there.

Her hands are in her lap. She is aware of them — aware of the right one specifically, the way it is resting against the top of her thigh with a pressure that is not yet intentional. She does not move it yet. The sequence has a first step and she has not decided to begin.

The city hum holds. The lamp holds. The mirror holds the image of her, knees together, considering.

She exhales through her nose — longer than she meant to, the breath unfolding before she had decided to release it, as if her body had already started without asking her.

Her right hand shifts one inch down her thigh.

The mirror shows her that too.