Xia [best] - Gloryhole

She pressed the plate.

Xia pulled her hand back. The brass plate was warm. Her grandmother’s song, which she’d thought lost forever, was now part of a ghost story in Prague.

She folded her duvet, warm and smelling of cheap detergent. Outside, the sky was the color of a bruise turning into a peach. gloryhole xia

There, behind a poorly patched hole in the drywall, was a new addition. A brass plate, no bigger than a credit card, gleamed under the weak light. It read: Gloryhole Xia. Push for a story.

"Again," she whispered.

Xia (a different Xia—her name meant "glow of dawn," though dawn felt years away) worked the night shift at a data-entry firm. Her life was a spreadsheet of repetitive tasks. She was terminally bored. And terminally curious.

A long pause. Then a story, the softest one yet: She pressed the plate

Xia’s hand trembled. She pulled the pen back. It was now engraved with two words: You’re enough.