The only person standing in the tiny windowless club, I hold in any move to dance like a secret, battling urges to conceal or spill it. The DJ stares at her controller, so I can stare at her: tape wound around her headphones, wire unspooling so the soft fuzz of insulation clouds the copper wire like they are electric veins through which sound flows to her ears. Her hands tense, hover over the jog wheels, fingers angled with so much control I ache, look away to the punctuation of nipples under her thin shirt, look away to her high cheek bones, stretching out, echoing broad shoulders. Her face is so angular, were I to sketch her, I would shape her face as an ice cream cone, bold chin, sloping forehead. A scoop melting into—I realize I’ve stopped even swaying, self-conscious. I love too quickly. I mean, I move too quickly into the beat, flush, but the women against the wall are all pixilated in the gloom, fixated on their phones. A cluster blocking the doorway chat with specters in the hallway: no one notices me. I shift into relief and glance to the DJ to see the raised corner of a half-smile, smirk, or intrigue side-lit by rechargeable LEDs propped in plants. My pride wants to exit into the humid night, but something in my lower stomach tugs me towards her booth. My mind reasons: I’m her one dancer, her pride can’t afford to deride me. My demon retorts, her pride must maintain high standards. Am I young enough? Over-dressed? How can I dance when so anxious to miss a beat before her? So I do push through the old city building’s air, muggier than the condensed cough I thought. Or imagined in frightened anticipation. Whatever my vocal cords are about to produce might either charm or repulse her. How often is luck truly mine? I’m not one of those astrology queers who can dissuade or console myself before opening my mouth that the planets are aligned against or in my favor. May the LED lights smooth my furrows, or her desire for a successful set spark her own magical thinking to favor me with the benefit of undoubted desirability. We’re hormone-saturated, inebriated on over-priced gin and under the table stimulants. “She kissed me” a rare vocal line breaks through. I don’t recognize the music: is that her pre-recorded voice? I start to extrapolate from the timbre about how she might whisper, how she might seduce, by which I really mean her politics: anti-zionist anarcho-feminist co-op member with a community garden plot—no that’s too basic. A bee box on her building’s off-bounds roof? She’s keeping a single bed of rare peppers there to whir hot sauce, her signature solstice party swag. I’m strategizing how I might wrangle an invite to her co-op solstice party and brew kombucha in time, flavored to impress her in return when I remember this is all my mind’s invention. Hot sauce might give her rosacea, she might suffer an allergy to bees, or hate the sensation of dirt forced under fingernails. Now I’m regretting not bringing the hip flask my father gave me for graduation: sobriety is crowding my conscious with doubt, but I can’t swallow another cheap drink. I almost taste tomorrow’s regret. Preemptive regret must be why I’m single. A few people have relinquished their couch cushions to dance. Everyone holds their—temporarily theirs—disposable cups in both hands as though they were riding waves requiring two points of support not to slosh. Their presence is license for me to approach. Pushed a little to the side now, I see that she’s barefoot behind the cloth fall of the DJ table. Her long, even toes seem shaped from moist clay, and when the light sweeps past, I see that the bottom centimeter of each foot where it might sink into the earth is paler, as though she tanned with her feet gently soaking in dark liquid. Would it count as a kink to sunbathe with your feet in honey? I feel a press, a swell, imagining the stickiness, the crevices between her toes. She’s clenching the toes on her right foot in time with the beat. Can a DJ ever sill? I wonder, does a beat pulse throughout her day? I would want to grasp that moment: to be at brunch or a matinee, look down and check whether her toes are keeping beat. If she’s barefoot, we’d have to be somewhere she’s comfortable. Other than her night at the club, where? Her balcony, sharing a coffee before work. In her garden one day off—why do I keep seeing her in a garden? It must be a labyrinth.
