Nasreen Tamaa Zankawah
Yaa lost the black umbrella on her twenty-second birthday—the night Edward found out that she had sex with his brother a week before. She followed Edward down the street across from her house, wailing and banging on the window of his old SUV as it sped off. She believed she deserved any punishment that would come her way, so she tossed away the umbrella her sister had shielded her with and accepted the cold rain.
“You can’t even keep a man? Girl, what exactly do you know how to do in this life?” Yaa’s aunt said when she found her wrapped in a quilt and sipping coffee at the kitchen table. The last time Yaa saw her was a month ago when she returned home drunk, with the wedding ring from her third marriage missing from her finger.
“Not today, Aunt,” Yaa mumbled, staring at her phone screen and hoping Edward would respond to the apologies she had been sending for the past five days. She wished she had given him a reason when he asked why she cheated. But she would rather die than tell him that his brother smiled at her for no reason, picked up her call when she was arrested for cutting the arm of her stalker with a knife, remembered her birthdays, and bought her gifts that weren’t framed photos of places she yearned to visit or mugs with his initials. She also couldn’t tell him that his brother’s laughter lessened the pain of her aunt’s sharp words.
When Edward reluctantly met her for dinner at his favorite restaurant, the words she had rehearsed disappeared, and the weight of her remorse lessened when he leered at every woman with a big butt passing by their table. His accusing stare—blaming her for not having what they had—made her choke on her orange juice. She chewed her salty chicken, thankful that he hadn’t asked her again to gain more weight. Instead, he asked her never to call him again and walked away, leaving a tail of mint cologne which always made her sneeze. The pelting rain that fell shortly after trapped her in the restaurant and in her misery— the rain-speckled glass window revealing her twitching right eye that happened whenever she cried. She wiped away her tears when she spotted the man standing outside the window with the umbrella she thought she had lost. He was identical to Edward—except that Edward would never smile at her like he did.
Nasreen Tamaa Zankawah is a Ghanaian writer, a journalist and a mental health first aider. Her novel, The Wild Rose, was published by Malthouse Press, and her poem, “Fallen Vine,” appeared in Spillwords. She is the sole writer of her blog, nasreenzankawah.com, where she publishes short stories, nonfiction, poetry, and opinion articles. She is an alumna of the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she pursued a master’s in English with a concentration in creative writing.