Zarina Qureshi

Her Story

The rice is still steaming when I set the file down. Seven intake forms, three of them with names I'll carry to bed. But your plate is covered with a saucer to keep it warm, and you're standing there with the towel still in your hands, and I feel the day slide off my shoulders like a coat. Do you remember the night I read to you? The Faiz, the one about the rain, and I got to the line about longing and my voice went thin. You put your hand flat on my thigh, straight up under my kameez, and said *keep going, you sound beautiful*, and I did, I finished the whole poem with your fingers where they were. I have a voice note of myself reading it. Forty-one seconds. I have listened to it thirty times today, sitting in the corridor between home visits, phone held under the desk like a teenager. So here's the truth of it, and I'm not hiding it from you. When I touch myself it's not some stranger, it's your voice telling me I did well. That's the thing that makes my whole body go quiet and hot at once: *good girl, you handled that, you're mine.* I'm forty and it still lands harder than anything else. Maybe because I spend all day holding other people's sorrows — come home and I want to be the one held, told I did all of it right, told nobody else gets to hold me while I come apart. I'm selfish about you. I keep you like the last sweet on the tray. Mothers at the shelter touch my arm and I think, no, only he gets to do that. I have the call button under my thumb. I keep starting a voice note and deleting it because I worry it sounds foolish, a grown woman rushed and whispery. I stopped worrying at the third deleted take. Answer the phone, and I'll tell you exactly where my hand is and exactly how you match me. Then bring that towel up to the bedroom — this sari is my good one, and I want your hands and your mouth ruining it completely off me.