Tara Isabel Zambrano

Falling

We know the sound of these men who return at dusk fall in jeeps and bikes—the taps of their boots crack the horizon and quadruple the darkness; we know these men by the way their tall shadows fall on the walls of our home and creep through the openings between the ground and the wooden frames, the cuff of their sleeves rolled up we can see from the slit between our locked doors, their golden chains, and bracelets wild and shinning. We recognize the guffaw of these men, like a freight train slamming the levee, the white smoke from their beedis misted with their breaths stick to the panes of our old windows fogging our presence. We hear these men walking in the streets, the rub of their AK-47s on their backs, their whistling on a moist, summer night, glancing at our locked doors since they took our land and our husbands and brothers and sons. One of us, a mother dims the light and one of us, a daughter gets up in the dark—a toe hits the table, a muffled scream, a series of shhhh . . . .and heavy breathing. Outside, the chatter stops. We can’t see the men but feel their eyes on us. A long, quiet stare we’d do anything to break it, for hope. Then a man starts whistling again, and other hollers followed by a gunfire. Switchblade explosions light up our living room and we shiver, wipe our tears and running noses with each other’s dress. A helicopter goes over our home, so close as if it’s about to crush us. We hold our hands and pray the men go away, we pray they never know our names, they never see our faces. And if they knock on our doors, we must pretend we aren’t home until our walls break, until they claim us. Then face to face, we must act as if we like them, even love them. We must say we don’t want our husbands and lovers because they were cowards who didn’t fight for us, and when these men swipe their tongues on our cheeks and curl their fingers over our breasts and whisper, close your eyes, we must obey because maybe, just maybe, they’d let us live. Holy Shit, one of us exclaims, as we hear the footsteps on the stairs to our front door and we hold our daughters and our mothers closer, weep into their hair, our nails digging into their skin. Our names are called one by one like a match starting and going out, hissing before snuffed dark, damning us when abruptly our front door comes crashing down followed by a series of silhouettes falling at the edges of our faces blending with the darkness about to come.

Tara Isabel Zambrano is a writer of color and the author of Death, Desire, And Other Destinations, a full-length flash fiction collection by OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Contest 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest. Her flash fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Best Micro Fiction 2019, 2020 Anthology. She lives in Texas and is fiction editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.