Apartment
That summer they had almost given up. They went to work and came back in the early evening. They made dinner quietly and politely asked how each other’s day was. They watched TV. Sometimes, he fell asleep on the sofa and she left him there and went to bed alone. On weekends they went to the secondhand market down on Liberty Road and rummaged through piles of other people’s discards. Snowshoes and teacups and old sports trophies and plaques and sweaters that said Made in USA. She liked to look for things that told a story, and he picked things he thought might be useful. Sometimes, they found something really unusual, like a half-written diary, and then they laughed over it, momentarily excited, but that feeling always passed.
In this way, their apartment was becoming a museum of rejection. They spent a long time setting it up with their finds, putting a thing here, then there, then taking it away altogether and abandoning it in the hallway closet for later. They would start in one room, each standing in front of the wall, each with a hammer in hand. He avoided touching her, waiting until she picked from the sack of discards in the center of the room, then reached in; she walked back and forth quietly, talking under her breath, unaware of him. She was faster to decide where to hammer or tape or hang and moved quickly. First one wall, then another, then the floor, then the side table. She strung fairy lights and yarn between windows, wrapped their lengths around shelves, draped the neck of the lightbulb. Sometimes, she lost interest and left the ends hanging. Her part of the room looked wild, like half-told anecdotes. He considered his decisions. He asked himself whether a thing belonged with another thing. He debated whether it was more important to admire something from a distance or to be able to reach it in case he needed to. When he was done, he packed away the hammers and cleared the nails off the ground. By the time he made it out of the first room, she would be sitting on the sofa, sipping water slowly, her eyes on the TV. He knew he should probably say something at the time, something like good, better, best, you must never let it rest or something else like that which would made her laugh burst through the room like when they had first moved in. But between the stacks of secondhand magazines and old phones and batiks from Indonesia or Malaysia — they hadn’t been able to agree which — they had filled their walls with other people’s lives. There was no room left for her laugh to echo. Thinking this, he could never bring himself to speak. Usually, he walked past her to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water and stood there drinking it till it was empty. Then he wiped the countertop with his hand even though there was usually nothing there to clean.
Once, from the corner of his eye, he saw her smiling at a ceramic plate she was holding up to the wall. She was standing next to the window in their bedroom, and the sunlight was falling on her face. It lit up the small mole beside her eye. He watched her lean in close, her nose nearly touching the porcelain like she was smelling it. Then, she turned her face gently and closed her eyes, her cheek resting against the plate. He wanted to ask what it was that was making her smile this way. But he had not seen this kind of tenderness on her face for a very long time and thinking that she must be savoring the feeling, he said nothing.
Standing in the room, looking at her next to the window, he could remember the time when they had looked at the bare walls and said we should do something about this. He had been just as full of love, then. The room had been just as bright.
* * * * *
A Record of Her Months
By November, deep into the medicinal haze, she won’t know why she picked up the dead sparrow from beneath the park bench, though mostly, they will tell her she couldn’t resist the delicate shrivel, the curling claws. It reminded her of her daughter’s hand, they will say, too blue, too stiff inside the coffin. Perhaps, like her daughter, she had wanted to have a box of odd objects, treasures from around the garden. She won’t remember now, strapped to her bed, the tip of a needle kissing her wrist. Soon, oblivion. Then, she will dream of the park where she could breathe, where her daughter laughed, all the way back in that lifetime that was August.
In August, there were two months: the one that was filled with buying cotton wool for a school project and taking her daughter to Anarkali Bazaar for yellow and green bangles and insisting on a stop at Liberty Market for pomegranate juice and telling her daughter have an ice cream, little bird and the Saturday trips to the New and Old bookshop for a magazine for her, a chapter book for her kid even if it cost more money than her husband allowed. And then the other month, the one where she picked out the smallest shroud she could find and washed between her daughter’s toes and sat alone at her kitchen table, a packet of oatmeal in her hands, crying because she had no one to make it for. Between the two months was that single turn from Alam Avenue onto Ghalib Road, that single moment of failure. Her husband was right. He had told her not to drive, hadn’t he?
In September, she tucked the bird inside her shirt and took it up to her room. It looked so small, so helpless it broke her heart. She tore up a pillowcase and made a pouch for it. When her husband sat across from her and asked if there was anything on her mind, she thought no, but I have something on my body. It was a comfort to have a secret. She liked the feel of the bird under her shirt as she walked about her house. At night, she laid it on the pillow next to her and pretended that it was alive. When she cried, she used the head to wipe her eyes. But then, it started smelling. Her husband told her to get away from him. The doctor came to find out why she smelled like rot. When they took the bird away, she sobbed; fell to the floor and did not hear her husband call her a disgrace to my house.
In October, she tried to escape: the gate, ladder and over the back wall of the hospital. The first time, the nurses understood and told her to quit it. The second time, they limited her hours outside. The third, they called her husband. He wrote. He had hoped some time away would fix her but now he was done. He had no patience for what she had become. Why would she do this to him? Why couldn’t she just be normal? Why wouldn’t she let people help? Why, why, why? The questioning was persistent. Someone left a dead mouse at her door one night. Giggles trailed her movement from bathroom to dining hall to her room.
I like dead things, I guess, she said one day. I guess I like that things die. No one liked that answer.
/ / / /
“Apartment” and “A Record of Her Months” are included in Lovebirds, Hananah Zaheer’s collection of flash fictions, published by Bull City Press on October 26, 2021. Click the title to order.