Stew

“Your husband is still alive.”

It was not familiar, the rasping voice of that man, not familiar at all, no matter how much I searched for something, anything, that would let me trust him, believe what the stranger on the other side of the phone was saying, that he really knew my husband was not dead. Proof, I wanted proof, wanted to ask where, when, how, friend, foe, near, far.

Instead, serenely:

“Bless you, if what you say is true.”

“Of course it’s true. Last night, I saw your husband just last night. We shared a cell together, he asked me to call you, gave me your name.”

Behind me, the children began to cry. Why did they begin to cry just then? Were they warning me to be careful? Were they catching something from the strangled breathless language of my body as I held the phone too close to my ear, the slim slope of my body that he loved to touch and slender downwards with his hands, my man, my man, my body now so abruptly rigid that it scared the children? Or were they crying because they were hungry, set off by the smallest one, she who never saw her father, who does not even know there is such a thing as a father, hungry for my milk as I stifled my words into the phone, hungry for the hands of a father to soothe her when there is no milk, when the lights sputter off in the night and the bombs fall nearby and my breasts are sour.

“He is well, you are telling me that my husband is well?”

And the response was what I expected and is not, can never be what I expect, the response from that rasp, that voice that has coughed too much, perhaps from too many cigarettes, perhaps, perhaps from too many screams wrenched from that throat: “Nobody can be said...