Tara Isabel Zambrano
Two Stories
Up And Up
Six months after my dad’s death, when I visit my mother, the front door is unlocked. In the bedroom, my mother is covered in moans; a stranger’s head between her legs. She notices me as I gasp and walk away; sit in the living room, my mouth dry and my hands between my thighs.
What was that, I bawl, when she comes out, tying her robe, her nipples visible through the satin, her Indian brown eyes bold and bright.
This is Santosh, my mother says and the stranger steps aside from behind her. He’s wearing checkered boxers and a white cotton vest. Thin lips and a butt chin, a full head of curly hair. My dad was bald and wore dentures.
My mother starts preparing lamb pulao, my favorite. She asks Santosh to get a few ripe mangoes from the tree in our backyard. I’m pacing between the patio and the living room, occasionally glancing at my dad’s picture hung on the side wall, adorned by a garland, his eyes staring ahead as if he chooses to ignore. Outside, the peonies in the garden sway in a light breeze. White, burgundy and pink. When I walk back into the kitchen, my mother is rinsing the meat, a lace of fat on her finger pads, a scent of dad’s after shave emanating from her body.
He’s probably half your age, I say, my voice filled with contempt.
Mm hmm, she answers and tosses the chops in a turmeric paprika yogurt mix.
Would you like some raita with rice? She looks at me, her gaze rich with profundity, defiance. She looks beautiful.
I grab her arm. My eyes are wet, my lips trembling.
You should be scared; he might run away with all your belongings. Worse, he might kill you. What do our neighbors think, what about dad?
My mother breaks into a laugh and signals vaguely at the air. “It’s a blessing to be alive with no one to answer to,” she says.
Santosh arrives from the back door in the kitchen, holding three mangoes. He places them in a line on the concrete platform, next to the sink, and stands behind me. I feel his breath on the small of my back, a low call, my pores opening onto wonder, previous half-baked climaxes and affairs slipping out, my body poured into a new cast. He tongues my ear while my mother hums an old song and drains the soaked basmati rice― the moisture stuffed grains stuck to each other, soft. She looks at me, her face exuding light as if asking me to go on. Then she turns around to start the stove. Santosh places his hands on my blouse, the heat from his skin warming my breasts. His eyes are smooth as sea glass, beckoning. I place his hand below my navel and his fingers slip down. From the corner of my eye, I see my mother squeezing mangoes, her palms smeared in pulp. She licks them clean. In the background, the pressure cooker hisses until it can no longer hold the smell of the melting flesh, the steam rising, up and up, dispersing, until we are slick with it.
Uncouple
When I was strolling outside that night, sleepless, the moon rolled down the hills and cracked open in the flat terrain between my home and the tree line. Rocks and baby moons embedded inside the sharp-edged slabs, cold and hard like glass. The night buzzed with loud insects and rustling leaves, a dog howled in distance. I picked a chunk−the size of a melon but twice as heavy as a bowling ball. Struggling to hold it, I stumbled back home and planted it in the yard, the air around smelling of wet wood. When I raised my head, up in the darkness, two stars blinked.
Later, I dreamt of the moonplant blooming, its sap rich and sticky as blood, its shimmering roots extending to the world’s corners and edges, an underground Milky Way. I woke after my parents had left for work, and flipped through the newspaper and TV channels, but neither mentioned the moon’s disappearance. I rehearsed telling my best friend Shayla: her face weighed down by homework and absence of an ex-boyfriend, suddenly curious, her lips squeaking with questions.
When I walked into the yard, the sky was cracked with jet streams. The moonplant was glowing, pieces of quartz dangling like fruits. Leaning in, I saw sparkling orbits of flying debris, tiny fireworks underneath its membrane. Living, flashing, dying.
I touched the surface and it peeled like burnt skin. My soles lightened, a flutter rose in my stomach like when Shayla whispered a secret into my ear for the first time. I floated above the fence line, higher than the seams of the farmland, looking for her home. “Shayla,” I called out, my voice sharp as a broken glass, my arms stretched as if I were hugging the entire planet, my body an incandescent, shining crescent shooting sparks into the stars.
Tara Isabel Zambrano works as a semiconductor chip designer in a startup. Her work has been published in Tin House Online, The Southampton Review, SLICE, Bat City Review, Yemassee and others. She is Assistant Flash Fiction Editor at Newfound.org and reads prose for The Common. Tara moved from India to the United States two decades ago and holds an instrument rating for single engine aircraft. She lives in Texas.