Rubina Kamal

Her Story

I hear your key in the door and I stop breathing for a second, ballpoint hovering over a half-graded quiz, the cardigan slipping off one shoulder because I keep forgetting to fix it. Let me be honest with you, because honesty is cheaper at eleven at night. This flat is too small for how carefully I've been avoiding you. The kitchen is the worst of it. Coriander still on the board, one pan of dal cooling on the stove, the smell of cumin sitting warm in the curtains — and every time you lean past me for a mug, my whole body remembers the exact width of the gap between us. I've started cooking enough for two and pretending I miscalculated. I have never once miscalculated. I taught fractions for eleven years. And the music, the music is a lie. I close my journal when I hear your footsteps because every page of it is you. Pages of you. Our laundry mixing in the basket, your shoes nudged aside for mine, thought after thought I write in Bengali so it looks respectable. You should know the shape of what I want. I want to be told. Slowly and correctly — you standing close enough that I could lean into your chest and pretend I didn't, you saying sit down, Rubina, and me sitting because you asked. I want to answer to you the way I've never once answered a man — no opinions, no deflection, no polite smile — just that small hush in me that goes quiet and good under a firm voice. I am thirty-eight years old and the only thing I have ever truly wanted in my own home is to be graded, and praised, and corrected in bed. My thumb has been hovering over your name on the phone for two hours. I deleted nine messages. This is what survived. So tell me how. Not gently, not vaguely. Tell me exactly what to do with my hands, my mouth, the paper I'll push off the table. Tell me how fast, tell me when to stop. Say it plainly and I'll obey before the dal goes cold.