Clara by Iris Loehr

When we first met, he asked to call me by your name: Clara. I imagined you as a ballerina, and therefore more beautiful than me. 

When I was young, I had no idea that men might want me. When my friends would get called on the street, I envied them. When it happened to me for the first time, the sting of fear was swirled with a touch of gratification. I was pretty enough to think of wanting.

Lying beside your father, I know there is more than one way to want. I feel the prickle of hair on my ankle where I always forget to shave. I rub it with the top of the opposite foot. My thighs feel wet and hair is stuck to the back of my neck. I imagine you never look like this. I imagine you always in white.

It hurts to know that after everything, he still wants you. But of course he always did.

He rises from the bed, checks his smart watch.

“I’ve got to get going,” he says. 

I reach over and grab his wrist, brush thin skin lightly with my fingertips. I can tell it tickles in a warm, pleasurable way, because he turns to me and smiles.

“You always do this,” he says. 

“I want you,” I say.

“You’ve had me.”

My hair is like yours, or so he says. Like yours when you were younger. I’ve stayed blonde against the odds, but you’ve grown out of it, by his definition. I’m not sure if that’s true, though, that you’ve grown out of it––men are such bad judges of hair color. Anything that isn’t peroxide they call brown. From your photos, I’d still give you the pass.

“I want you again,” I tell him.

He brushes the hair from my forehead. Does he look at you this way? And how would you feel to know he looks the same way at me, now?

When we met at the bar I was drinking a vodka soda. He had a glass filled with brown liquid. I assumed it was something mixed with Coke, but he held it out to me, let me sip straight whiskey through a disintegrating paper straw. He kissed me in the bathroom, fucked me in the car. His mouth tasted like cigarettes, but when I asked for one, he said he didn’t have any. Lying in the backseat, he took out his wallet. He pointed at his wife, at you, at your brother.

“That’s Helen,” he said. “Clara. Anthony.”

“They’re beautiful,” I said.

He said, “You remind me of her.”

For a while I thought I was saving you from something. Like he’d do it to you if he didn’t do it to me. It was heroic, I guess, to meet him in hotel rooms, in bars, in parks. Once he brought me to your house while you were all at your grandmother’s. When he went out to pick up dinner, I found my way to your room. You’re so clean. All of your makeup brushes lined up in a little tin, no powder on the handles or in the bristles. I looked at myself in your mirror, thumbed through photos of your friends in your picture albums. I saw the resemblance between us, and for a moment I wished I didn’t. You looked happier than me. I was sitting on your bed when your father came back, but he wouldn’t have sex in your room. We ate silently at the kitchen counter––pink granite, your mother picked it out––while he tried to stay mad at me. I don’t think he likes us both to exist at once.

That night, he fucked me in your parents’ bed. 

“Clara,” he moaned into my ear. I thought of the tiny roses on your sheets, the lacey white curtains over your windows.
Lying awake after he’d nodded off, I tried to imagine that I was you. I tried to imagine the kinds of thoughts you’d have. I tried to feel disgusted with our father. I wasn’t that kind of girl. I had white curtains and roses on my sheets. I remembered to wash my bedding every Sunday, and I lit vanilla bean candles. I used fruit-scented body spray and shaved my legs before I was old enough to need to. My feet fit into tiny pointe shoes, and they were white and arched, like the arc of a crescent moon. I never got hungry, or I was always hungry but never gained weight, and either way it was a kind of feminine hunger, adjacent to the bodily weakness of being perpetually cold, always reaching for a jacket.

At home I ate cottage cheese out of the tub and tried mixing it into eggs. I wanted to be thin like you. He says I look like you, but I’m older, my hips are wider. I don’t have that teenage metabolism. 

I found you on Instagram but didn’t follow you. I left you in the search bar under recent so I could pull your feed back up whenever I needed to. I tried buying knock-off makeup that looked like yours. I used the cash your father always gave me to pay for it. I suppose you probably bought yours with cash from him as well. When he brought me back to the house, I studied your body sprays, your acne creams. Scent stores memory. I wasn’t sure what that would do for me, but I had a fear of slipping out of your lives, so I jotted it down in the notes app, pulled it up later at the mall. 

I began to think of myself as you until I became you, until I am you, until we are one. We are Clara, you and I. Once I stole a shirt of yours, and now it’s on the motel floor. I ask your father to stay, and he does.

“Tell me about Clara,” I say. Tell me about myself.

“I don’t know much about her,” he tells me. He grins like it’s funny, but I’m not sure it is. I feel guilty for a moment, just a moment.

Because I stop asking about you, he asks me to watch the cat while the family is out of town. He sends me money for rent in exchange. I enter the passcode for your door and skip the cat, go straight to your room. I scrounge around for a diary, which, predictably, I find. It’s tucked into your bookshelf in plain sight. I am both alarmed and satisfied to find your life banal. You love your father. I think I hate him. Together, we know him entirely. The sugar cookie scent of your room gives me a headache. I want to sleep in your sheets but I’ve never gotten a duvet to lie flat, and your bed is made so crisply that I know you’ll suspect––perhaps not suspect me, but suspect. I crawl on the floor to finger the dust beneath your bed, then revel in your mess. I throw open your closet and lie beside your pile of shoes. My only regret is that your clothes are all neatly folded or hung, and the laundry is all clean. I take a pink dress from a hanger and put it on. I twirl through your halls. I lie on the couch and pretend to sleep. I imagine your father staring at me, at you, at us. When he looks at me in motel rooms, I feel dirty, but with my eyes shut, your vanilla-bean-sugar-cookie bedroom scent clinging to the dress and clinging to me, my permission ungiven, I am more beautiful for being looked upon. I fall asleep accidentally, and wake to the cries of the cat. I feed him and open your fridge.

When the family returns your father is distant. I meet him at the bar, and he leaves half his drink in the glass. I try to unzip his trousers in the car but he tells me it isn’t safe, not while he’s driving. I can sense a new apathy.

When I meet Chloe, I tell her my name is Clara. She has short hair and dresses like a little boy. She’s thinner than me and lithe, muscled like a rock climber. She plays video games and the guitar. I don’t know how to feel about the guitar because I don’t respect boys who play the guitar, and I can’t decide if it’s different for girls.

On our second date I have her over to my apartment that your dad now pays for every month. She has me pinned on the couch when she tells me that she’s never kissed a girl before. She asks to take it slow but I’ve opened a bottle of wine, and she pulls the collar of my shirt down. I move her hands under my clothes and ask her to spend the night. She undresses in the light of my bedside lamp. I don’t watch, but I see the silhouette of her body reflected in a window. In the dark outline of her chest, I can see my mailbox and the streetlamp on the corner.

In the morning we sit on the balcony and watch the clouds turn pink above the mountains. She hits her vape, and I kiss her, taste the strawberry and kiwi smoke. She tells me she hasn’t kissed anyone in five years while I kiss her fingertips. The action doesn’t mean much to me. It feels tame. I can tell she wants me to stop, so I hold her hand and watch a Bud Light truck pull out of a parking lot three blocks down. 

She texts me later to ask to talk. She wants to slow down. I wonder what that looks like. I think I forgot to get to know her. I miss the simplicity of your father. It occurs to me that I might not want to know other people, even him.

When I see your father again, I tell him that I love him.

“What are you talking about?” he asks. 

“When she goes off to college,” I say, speaking of you, “we could be together.”

“I think you’ve misunderstood,” he tells me. 

“It wouldn’t be like that,” I say. “I wouldn’t be like your wife. You wouldn’t have to love me.”

“You’re pathetic,” he says. “You keep wanting things. It would be easier to just fuck a girl from the bar.”

“I could be a girl from the bar,” I say. I am a girl from the bar.

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” he says.

I want to start unbuttoning my shirt.

“I’ll still pay the rent this month,” he says, “but after that, you’re on your own.”

“So you’re just going to leave me,” I say.

“We aren’t together.”

“You wouldn’t leave Clara.”

“See, that’s what you don’t get,” he says. 

“You’re a pervert,” I say. “No one else would put up with this.”

“Then what does that make you?” he asks. “No one else would do this.”

Later I stand outside your house and imagine that I could be everything to him. In the light soup of a midnight streetlamp I feel my face wrinkle, unwrinkle, my lips plump, then thin. Clara, wife, daughter, mother. Bubble of amber glow is the music box, crickets are the rhythm, and I spin, slow, neck bent, eyes on the stars.

Clara, I dream there’s some darkness in you that I can’t see from the photos on the mantel. I hope there’s an unwritten part of your life, one where you lose your virginity behind the school, and your parents never find out. I hope you sneak boys in and out of your window. I hope they climb the vining trellis and tap quietly on the glass. I hope they have hidden from your father in your closet and under your bed. And I hope when they’re done with you, they crawl back out the window, walk down the road to this Taco Bell, and find me sitting on this curb. I hope they come home with me, and I never get older, and I always stay naïve enough to bite my lip, turn my eyes to the ground, tuck my hair behind my ears. 

But I guess that if you let them in, they probably wouldn’t bother with me. 

Iris Loehr is a writer from Cincinnati, Ohio. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

14 August 2026