Andrés Villarreal

I wasn’t wearing anything under my skirt when I knocked on that rusted railcar door. I only wanted one man. I had no idea the foreman would show up to lay down his rules.

For thirty years we’d kept crossing paths by chance. That rainy afternoon, in the pharmacy queue, she looked at me differently. And I did too.

I was trained to please and obey, but that half-open door awakened something else: a spark of defiance that even cold rings against my skin couldn’t extinguish.

I know I shouldn’t, but whenever I walk home alone after dark, I look for him: the stranger who will pin me against the wall without asking permission.

She expected a frail husband she could despise. When the king bent to kiss her hand, the tip of his tongue brushed her skin, and she knew she had been wrong.

He arrived at the den little more than a chained skeleton. The she-wolf promised to teach him what it meant to serve her... and he learned better than she expected.

I woke up unscarred in a bed that wasn’t mine, healed by a stranger of impossible beauty. What he didn’t tell me was what that cure had done to my body... and my desire.

I thought it was the receptionist coming back for something she’d forgotten. It was her, with that smile that never meant anything innocent, and the lock turning behind her.

I thought it was just an innocent game of glances at a traffic light. I never imagined that one Saturday morning I’d ring his doorbell with the most ridiculous excuse.

I always knew my mother was different from the others, but not until that dawn did I understand how different — or how far I was willing to go.

It took me two weeks to admit I wanted it to happen again. And one dawn, instead of running away, I sat on that stair and waited for them.

I heard him on the phone say, “This old lady is ready.” I should have been offended. Instead, I felt myself get soaked right there against the bar.

Her boyfriend played with his phone a meter away while she left the fitting-room curtain half open and, every time she undressed, checked that I was still there.