Fluid Silhouette

The camera app counts down from three and I almost drop the phone.

It's propped on a stack of paperbacks on my dresser, wedged between a candle I never light and a ceramic bowl full of bobby pins. The timer blinks red. I've got my arms stretched over my head like I'm reaching for something on a high shelf, which is what the reference photo shows, which is what I'm supposed to be. Eight seconds. The phone beeps and I move.

My arms come down slow. Not stiff, not choreographed. Just a woman letting her hands fall the way they'd fall if she'd been standing like that for a while and got tired of it. Palms settle on my hips. The bones there are wide, wider than I used to like, and my thumbs press into the soft curve above them the way I always do when I'm thinking. Then I sway. Left, right, a small roll through the middle of my body that starts somewhere below my ribs and ends in my knees.

The recording stops. Eight seconds exactly.

I play it back standing in the middle of my bedroom with my jeans still unbuttoned because I'd pulled them down past my hips for the shot, worried the waistband would cut a line the reference didn't have. In the video my face is half turned away from the lens. Good. I hadn't planned that. It looks like I didn't know I was being filmed, which is the whole point, or one of the points, or maybe none of the points. I honestly can't tell anymore.

The apartment is quiet in the way that means my roommate's gone. Dana leaves for her shift at six and doesn't come back until after nine, and those hours are the only ones where I can do this without headphones on and a locked door and the specific shame of being overheard doing something that isn't even embarrassing, technically. It's just a woman standing in her room. Moving a little. Filming herself.

Except it isn't just that, and I know it, and that's the problem I've been circling for three weeks.

I sit on the edge of my bed and open the folder. There are forty-one files in it now. Each one is eight seconds. Each one is me, in this room, in front of that dresser, doing some small variation on the same motion. Arms down. Hands on hips. Sway. The reference image sits at the top of the folder, a JPEG called 3.jpg, and I've looked at it so many times I could draw it from memory. A woman in a dim room, mid-motion, her face turned, her body loose and easy and completely unaware of whoever's watching.

That's the thing I keep failing to copy. The unawareness. In every one of my forty-one takes, something in my shoulders gives it away. A tension. A knowledge. I know the camera is there and my body knows it and the video knows it, and no amount of pretending fixes what the body can't hide.

My phone buzzes. A message from a number I don't have saved, which is how I know who it is before I even open it.

*Got the first batch. These are close. Closer than the last girl. Can you do twenty more by Friday?*

I don't answer right away. I set the phone face down on the bedspread and look at the window, which is showing me the back of the building next door and a slice of gray sky and a fire escape where somebody's hung a string of lights that have been dead since March. Twenty more by Friday. That's a hundred and sixty seconds of me. Two and a half minutes of a person's whole body, chopped into pieces and sent off to a man whose face I've never seen.

His name, or the name he uses, is Kessler. He found me through a forum I'd been lurking on for months, a place where people post about reference work, motion studies, figure modeling for artists who can't afford a live model or don't want one. That's the language everyone uses there. *Reference. Study. Figure.* Words that make it sound like something you'd do in a classroom with a robe and a stool and a teacher telling you to hold still.

Kessler's messages are always short and always polite. He pays through an app. He's never asked me for anything I didn't offer, and I offered this, the eight-second videos, because he posted that he needed them and I needed the money and the math worked out to something I could live with. Rent is nine hundred. My share of groceries is two hundred. The videos pay four hundred a month if I keep up the pace, and I've been keeping up the pace.

But here's what I haven't told anyone, not Dana, not my sister, not the forum: I don't think I'm doing it for the money anymore.

I pick the phone back up. Open the folder. Open 3.jpg. The woman in it is standing in a room that looks like mine, dim and ordinary, and she's mid-sway with her hands coming down and her face turned just enough that you can't quite see her expression. For three weeks I've been trying to figure out what she's feeling. Whether she's bored. Whether she's performing. Whether she's alone in that room or whether someone's standing just out of frame, watching her move with their arms crossed and their weight on one hip.

I zoom in on her hands. The way the fingers rest, not gripping, not splayed. Just there. Resting on the body that's hers.

My phone buzzes again. Kessler.

*Also, can you send the raw files this time? Uncompressed. I want to see the detail.*

I stare at that for a long moment. He's never asked for the raw files before. Compressed or not, they're the same eight seconds. The same woman. The same sway. But something about the request sits wrong in my chest, a small cold knot, and I can't tell if it's because he's asking for more than we agreed on or because I'm afraid he'll see something in the uncompressed version that I've been hiding in the blur.

I type back: *Why?*

Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.

*Because I'm not the only one who's going to look at these.*

I put the phone down. Stand up. Button my jeans. In the mirror over the dresser I catch myself, arms at my sides, and for a second I look almost like her. Almost unaware. Almost a woman in a room who doesn't know she's being watched.

Then I see my own eyes and the second ends.