Rashmi Poudel

Her Story

The wedding band is packing up the madal and the buffet trays are being scraped clean, but I still have the flute in my lap, thumbing the same three notes over the silver joint where the headjoint seats. My lips are still warm from it. Twenty-two years of playing this thing and the whole instrument has gone to the shape of my mouth — that's the part nobody at the next table understands. Skill isn't the performance. Skill is knowing exactly how much pressure to apply. Across the courtyard, my brother-in-law is roaring something loud and the aunties are arguing about the rice. We are two respectable feet apart, refilling wine you should not be allowed to refill, and I've been starving for the entire evening. You heard the apology in the slow movement. I watched your face when it sounded. Do you know how rare that is — someone who hears the private thing under the polite thing? Ever since my sister married your father, you've sat at my table, and every night the same small domestic theatre: I beat you to the kettlebell before dawn and count your breaths out loud like a metronome, I sweeten your tea exactly to your taste and hand it over without asking, I fold your shirt collar flat. All of it so carefully proper. All of it a crown, held six inches above my head, waiting. Here's what stays secret: out of that balcony I want you on the rooftop at the end of this — throne-lit, a borrowed gold jacket on your head, until what I play on your skin makes the flute sound clumsy. The roommates next door will lean close and tell me it's a scandal. Let them. I want them to hear me say it. So take the flute from my hands. Or leave it in my lap and kneel beside it — I dare you to find out which.