Through a series of six photos in a dating app photo gallery, meet the narrator of Charlie Wührer’s new flash, “I Am A Tinder Lesbian Holding a Sanding Machine.” Do you have a good sense of humor? Are you looking for a DIY queen? Behold, she begins. Here is her sanding machine.
Photo No. 1
Behold my sanding machine. I carried it up six flights of stairs from the basement to take this photo. With one hand. See how my dewy skin and acrylic pink-tipped nails contrast the matte khaki green of the machine. If we match, I will protect the integrity of your tender-soled feet by sanding smooth every one of your wooden floorboards. As DIY queen, it is my royal prerogative to make you vacuum away the sawdust when I’m done. Sashay, I will order, and afterwards we will make an erotically charged game of checking your soles for splinters.
Photo No. 2
Feast your eyes upon this graffiti I stumbled across in an alleyway in Lisbon. As you can see, it says WET AND ANGRY. I demonstrate my humility with this photo of graffiti I did not spray myself: a photo humble in its absence of my body. And yet it speaks truth–I am capable both of great wetness and great enactments of hot consensual rage, sometimes at the same time. You will divine from the contextual subtext of this graffiti that I am well-travelled. With this photo, I promise we shall soon be wetter than the Travi Fountain in Rome, where I will take you after you have swiped right.
Photo No. 3
Here is a photo of me wearing a rainbow wig.
Photo No. 4
I am looking down pensively at my thumbs, which are hooked into the waistband of my lace underwear. I have created a tiny yet thrilling gap between fabric and flesh to emphasise the ripped-ness of my abs. You, too, could have your thumbs hooked into my waistband. In this photo, you see that I like what I see. You will also like what you see, if you swipe right. I’m wearing an off-white T-shirt, hinting at innocence, if that’s what you’re into. The evening sun distorted by a hairline crack in my camera lens casts an entirely accidental halo above my head.
Photo No. 5
Accept this New York Cheesecake I brandish strategically in this penultimate photo as a token of future tokens. As you can see, I 1) prudently disrobed to bake and 2) am a person of at least two skills (see photo No. 1). You may safely assume that I have many more besides: not pictured, for example, is the photo of me holding a bronze medal at a hula-hooping contest.
Photo No. 6
Have this last photograph as evidence that I am someone who interacts with other people. Featured: me, wet and angry, standing before a colossal waterfall next to my ex-girlfriend. I have covered her face with a digital heart sticker for privacy and data protection purposes, but even then you can tell she thought she was cooler than she was. Behold the baby-pink cap with its jauntily leaping, embroidered trout, how it tempts fate with the words WOMEN WANT ME FISH FEAR ME.
If you’re sold by the promise of tender soles and your thumbs in my underwear, by visions of cheesecake and incidental nudity, and by the good kind of wet and angry, HMU and I’ll take you to this little fish restaurant I know.
Charlie Wührer is a queer writer and literary translator from the UK who lives in Berlin. Charlie’s writing has been published online and in print, including in Vagabond City, Fruit Journal, and Wicked Gay Ways. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she has been shortlisted for various short story prizes. She is writing her first novel.