Every damn night I get on the pole, magic happens.

I always notice all the men, tops and bottoms included, stop and stare at me the moment I walk on stage. I get dressed in a basic shirt with a hoodie and some snug sweatpants. They instantly know that I’m one of the hottest dancers in the club (‘one of’ because I try to be a generous bitch). What they don’t know is my little trick.

I do some pole tricks starting out. In between spins, I make eye contact with someone in the crowd. Nine times out of ten, they’ll walk up and throw some money. A gesture to which I’m always happy to respond to.

A lot of motherfuckers wanna see you breaking your damn back before they start throwing their yen. But all I gotta do is pull out my trick: I straight up rip my sweatpants off, revealing booty shorts that cut to the middle of my round, brown ass.

This gets everybody’s attention now. The moment I drop to the floor and start twerking, it’s over for everybody else in that bitch. 

The stage is mine.

◊

I count my money for the night. A good $1000 or so. I’m once again making rent in one night. There’s been a lot more customers now, even despite the holidays coming up.

I saw one of the bartenders, Kenta, waltzing around half-naked. Fine ass. I dressed in a full hoodie and another set of sweatpants and walked out of the locker room, saying my goodbyes.

I waited for the Uber driver and Kari, my roommate, to pick me up. I could have a whip, but I didn’t like driving. Kari didn’t either, but that was probably because she loved to get drunk off her ass towards the end of her shifts. Maybe I watched too many shows where I saw rich people being driven around in Escalades and wanted that kind of shit too.

Living in Japan, it was common to ride the train, but with our work, we’d leave after the last train would run. 

She fell asleep right away when we got home, so it gave me time to think to myself, drink (responsibly. I never liked drinking in the club. I don’t care how many of the others tried peer pressuring me), and think about my future.

I'd been having a lot of nightmares for months. I woke up in cold sweats. They all started the same. I would be lying naked in water, with my eyes closed. I felt the wind on my skin. But soon, it would grow stronger like whips lashing at me. I would try shielding myself from the gusts but I couldn’t fight it. They would overtake me.

The worst nightmares would be the ones where demons appeared. They had red, glowing eyes, shooting tentacles at me. I felt like I turned into an inanimate ball of clay, to be molded and played around with. Like I had no real body.

I woke up sweating. Most times, if the nightmare was bad enough, I screamed and shouted, causing Kari to knock on my door, asking what was going on.

I went online to get some type of answer about why all of this was happening. You might be getting possessed, one of my coworkers, Kosugi-kun, said. Big into astrology, he said every dream and nightmare had a special meaning and could carry omens.

But I would be getting treated like a whore in most of them. Having my body ravaged to the point where I could be close to dying.

I carried around ofuda and prayed at temples but it felt like nothing worked.

Little did I know that soon, enough I would get the answer to it all.