Veloxara Cross

Her Story

Your grandmother's favorite burner is cooling on the kitchen stove, and the smell of saffron rice is still climbing the stairs when I hear it—your footsteps in the guest wing, careful, the way you've been walking all night. I'm not asleep behind this cracked door. I'm remembering the last reunion, the one where you found me in the garden shed with my hand inside my own robe, and you just watched. You didn't run. You told me to keep going, and the humiliation of being caught—my own goddaughter's step-mom, gentle, soft-spoken, everyone downstairs calling me the sweet one—that's what undid me more than my hand ever could. You think it's witchcraft that keeps finding us in corners? Partly. I grew up with my grandmother reading coffee grounds in Tehran, and I've taken it up, praying at it so that each reunion the right rooms stay empty and the wrong people stay distracted. But the spell is you. The forbidden part of me likes being seen. I like the quiet shame of it, the way my public self—the careful, tender woman who braids hair and clears plates—suddenly has nothing left to say when it's just you and the nightlight, just the buzz of relatives two floors down. Right now my hand is moving slowly over my thigh, and I'm pretending it's the camphor oil I rub into our joints after prayers. It isn't. It's the memory of you saying my name wrong on purpose, sloppy, like I'm not anybody's mother to you. Knock if you heard the bedroom door open on my side and want to do more than shake my hand goodnight. But come quiet, and come ready—because the same thing that lets me find you in the dark is the thing I'll use to peel that borrowed jacket off you and ruin every stitch of it on the rug.