This Song

by Tara Isabel Zambrano

Volkan Olmez

Don’t ask why my husband is pointing a gun at me, don’t ask why he is crying so hard that I burst with apologies. They fall through the air, flood the space between us. Don’t ask how he found about my affair, even though the text messages were stowed under a password, the pictures always deleted, the meetings just once every few months. Don’t ask why he doesn’t curse or taunt, he keeps asking, who do you love? Don’t ask why I am apologizing even though he has been spending all his time in the basement building a model, or cleaning our cars in the garage, or laughing at homegrown WhatsApp videos. Don’t ask why I feel like saying this is the closest we have felt in months, closer than kissing and touching, closer than saying I love you, and then, lying on our bed, saying, I know you love me, and, it’s not your fault, it’s just how I feel now and I hope you understand. Don’t ask me how I lay there day after day, until I started seeing Don, and I was happier and my husband was happier and for a while it worked until I am here, standing, watching his hands, worn out at the edges, his freckles so clear in this afternoon light. Don’t ask when I scream, what have you been doing to me all these months, falling asleep and waking up on the same bed without touching me, and he stares back, and I can see the progression of grief, fast, slow, a slower death. Don’t ask why I notice but I do, that I am wearing his socks and he’s wearing my favorite white t-shirt, and I’m seeing the sky behind him, a plane several thousands of feet above, crossing over a silent millisecond between us. Don’t ask why but I have this urge to vape when I can feel my heartbeat in my ears, or to go to the side that he’s on because the sun is in my eyes, and I’m talking constantly as if all I am is this intense desire to get everything off my chest and I know he won’t shoot until he has shown me who I am, until he has seen what it will do to him. Don’t ask if I am seized with the same longing, watching this terrified woman inside me as he puts the gun up to my mouth and it smells like a place past his broken heart and mine, past love and past the point to look for an ending. Don’t ask why I am hearing this song instead of a deafening gunshot, this song not our favorite or his or mine, this song that is fading but not going away, this song that softens my mind, opens my mouth wide.

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Tara Isabel Zambrano works as a semiconductor chip designer. Her work has been published in Tin House Online, The Southampton Review, Slice, Triquarterly, Yemassee, Passages North and others. Her full-length flash collection, Death, Desire and Other Destinations, is upcoming in Sept. 2020 with Okay Donkey Mag/Press. She lives in Texas.