Paper Is White by Hilary Zaid6/30/2023 I was glad she wouldn’t be able to tell Francine what she saw as I palmed the phone from its cradle and stared at it, rehearsing the digits in my head. Lola’s collar jingled when I walked in she lifted her head, then settled her muzzle down again between two paws. Through the French doors, small squares of milky, urban late-evening light glowed against the East Bay darkness. That night, as Fiona’s jet dipped into the thick, blurred batting over San Francisco Bay, I lied to my fiancée about where I was going and crept into the shadowed living room of the house we shared to dial my grandmother’s number. But my grandmother, a widow, had cherished me. My parents had loved me in their own, distracted way. On the night my best and oldest friend sped three thousand miles west to hear the news of my engagement, it struck me finally and with the force of revelation that I couldn’t get married without telling my grandmother first. When the man came home that evening, he saw the jacket and the shoes, and accused his wife of unfaithfulness. The song turned itself into a pair of men’s shoes, and sat partway under the bed. One day the story said, ‘Bahin, this woman will never let us out.’ So the next day, while the woman’s husband was away, the story turned itself into a man’s jacket, and draped itself near the door. It’s about a woman who knew a story and a song, but she never told the story, and she never sang the song. There’s an Indian tale you may know, from a collection called A Flowering Tree.
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