The 22-Year-Old House Call

Su Nian is twenty-two and studies at university, where her classmates think they know her. At night she crosses the eastern suburbs on paid house calls, into the bedrooms of wealthy older men who booked a massage and expect the hour to stop being a job. They treat her skill as permission, and the line she meant to hold thins at each new door. / She tells herself the work is only tuition and rent. None of those men intends to remain an appointment. She has not decided whether the next door is still a job, or a house that has started to keep her.