Madame Curie Divines Pure Radium
While French Kissing a Beautiful Stranger
Tara Isabel Zambrano
Radium is the best because it doesn’t conform to rules. Radium godly like multiple electric arcs, a blink in your gaze that followed me in my dreams. Radium isotopes in a test tube, in the pockets of my lab coat, radium that disintegrated us like loose atoms, radium that choreographed our science.
You were fonder of radium than I was, but everyone didn’t think so. Atoms decay, you said. So do we, I retorted, the backdrop of our lab thinning in the radioactivity of our bodies. Half-life is all we lived with authority, the other half gone in second guessing, dying. Like Radium, sometimes the sunlight turned green when it reflected from the tip of your nose, as if it touched your breath.
Radium pulled us apart. Its native white outshone us. Radium held us hostage, our alkaline anchor. Radium narrowed our lives like pipettes, our minds wide as our lab corridors. Radium permeated into our notebooks, deposited in our bones. Tiny pains, toothaches, coughs, creaking, clicking knees, luminescent, poisonous, human shaped.
After your death, I dressed in black, exposed to your absence. Radium at the end of its life becoming lead. I went back to the uraninite. At night, I pulled the test tube out. Radium’s ability to react quickly, never alone. Unstable, heavy. Radium measuring the past and the future in radiation. Glowing. I marveled at its design, its lingering warmth. Then I cried why my love became better for you after you died. Your face spilled out from my memories, your eyes mesmerized by a deeper truth of radioactivity. If discovery had an atomic weight. If enthrall emitted a brilliant green flame that never went out.
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, won second prize in Bath Flash Awards 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest, 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.