“That day on my way to work I hear a radio story about a pathogenic fungus that fills sex-crazed cicadas with mold to shrivel their abdomen and genitals but not their appetite to fuck”
by Tara Isabel Zambrano
Sex, Kink, and the Erotic
That night, at dinner you ask me what I am thinking. I gulp a spoonful of dal.
“Well...,” I say. Cicadas mating without most of their bodies, are vibrating in my head.
“It’s alright,” you say and place your hand on my left hand. I take another spoonful. Yellow with a layer of ghee, a rich sheen, slippery and warm.
You go back to eating. I watch your hands, your arms, you never had much hair. What would we do if we lost our limbs, our genitals, and lay next to each other, helpless throughout the endless room of night, our skin turning blue without touching, blue with loneliness, blue as an empty promise of forever love? I do not want to imagine that. But in doing so, I remember all the ways I conjure your body: you cooking, you carrying our asleep children to bed, you swearing while fixing the sprinklers, you glancing at the mortgage papers before signing your name next to mine. You, long ago, a giant cicada filled with spores, fucking me for the eighteenth time in a shabby motel not far from our university, your heart pounding, the air whistling out of your mouth and each time it seems we’re not going to make it to the end, we don’t blink until you bite down on my shoulder hard. Then as if rejuvenated by the pain, we start all over again.
About Tara Isabel Zambrano
Tara Isabel Zambrano is the author of Death, Desire And Other Destinations, a full-length flash 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 the Bath Flash Award 2020, and been a Finalist in the Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and the 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 the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.