She tried to gaze at her reflection in the mirror, but the mirror was stained by fingerprints, producing an image that was blurred and distorted. The room around her reeked of rubber and of sweat, of used dresses and of nail polish. Past issues of Playboy lined the dresser drawer, pages open and images marked. She straightened her attire for the day: a lacy black dress, wrapped tightly around her like a bodice, which accentuated the parts of her body that enticed and confused every man she encountered.

The atmosphere was one of tense anticipation, akin to the ambience of a rehearsal room split seconds before a theatrical performance. A stream of fear catapulted from her toes to her heart, for she knew that in the succeeding moments, a man would enter the room, scrutinize the vicinity for an empty space in which two people could “lie down and chat about sweet nothings”, and let the hours dissipate in a session of rigorous physical acrobatics.

She dabbed her face with a sponge, ensuring that her face was enameled in rouge. Her primary desire was to ensure that her pallid features were shrouded by the façade of makeup. Peering at the windows, she longed to let fresh air permeate the room and diffuse the odor of rubber, which nauseated her. Yet she remembered her boss’ caustic remark to every visitor of this estate – “Never let the girls open the windows; it increases their chances of bolting mid-session with the cash that you used to spend hours in paradise” – and realized that her efforts, although for a different purpose, would be futile.

Curling her eyelashes with jet-black mascara, she surveyed the Playboy magazines, and pondered over the doodles that rendered A-sized breasts the size of D-sized breasts, and skimpy nightdresses tightly wound fishnets. What was this undisclosed desire that was harbored within every man, this insatiable thirst that inundated their bodies and sent them spiraling into realms of sexual dissipation? What was this need for awakening, that left them heaving for more after their sessions, that prompted them to plunge, in a fit of passion, into a woman’s silent parts, irrespective of her identity or the diseases she may be carrying? And as she stared blankly in the mirror, she wondered: what causes men, to disregard the consequences of their private acts, to slither like innocuous shadows around the meandering lanes of marriage, in order to have a few hours of carnal – yet ephemeral – stimulation?

Her fingers crawled up her cheeks, as she wiped a tear from her eyes. The clamor of footsteps approached her, but ebbed with the creak of a shutting door. She kept ruminating over her past thoughts, yearning for her ideas to converge at a zenith on which a true awakening could emerge out of the dusty powder of her life, out of the quiescent sea of her mind in which she had disposed all of her thoughts, and all of her worries, for so many years.