Tara Masih

Tara L. Masih received an MA in Professional Writing and Publishing from Emerson College. She has published fiction, poetry, and essays in numerous anthologies and literary magazines (such as Confrontation, Hayden's Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, New Millennium Writings, Red River Review, and forthcoming in The Caribbean Writer), and her essays have been read on NPR.

Awards for her work include the Lou P. Bunce Creative Writing Award, first place in The Ledge Magazine's 1995 fiction contest, a finalist fiction grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

Tara grew up on Long Island playing in the woods that bordered her property on one side and in the meadow that grew up to her poperty on the other. She finds the natural world always insinuates itself into her writing, even when she doesn't intend it to. She now works as a freelance book editor and writer in Andover, Massachusetts.

contact Tara Masih at MasihT@aol.com

Fiction by Tara L. Masih

The Wedding Ritual

You didn’t want to kiss him, but you thought you should. After all, it was after a summer wedding, after watching your friend get married for the second time, both you and this man still single, a set-up by the groom. The reception—under a tent on a bucolic golf course, late afternoon sun giving way to a light cast over manmade hills that reaches the party and bathes each one in that sepia Hallmark glow you see in movies, where there is gossamer thistledown floating around for effect, only there’s no such effect now. And the buffet is a feast of oysters and shrimp on ice and lemon wedges and hand-broken bread in tilted baskets, elegant if you ignore the flies.

And this stranger started off the evening handsome and bright, but after 4 whiskey sours, 3 Michelobs, and 2 glasses of champagne, his eyelids are shuttering in that look you recognize. You know he is one who is used to carrying much liquor around in his veins, which makes him able to continue dancing and conversing, but now he is pressing a knee against yours. You suppose he wants you to feel your stomach jump as he makes this approach, but instead what builds from the heat of his muscle is a microlayer of sweat between your skin and acrylic dress. You could withdraw, but you don’t. He tries to convince you that you are both the same, and you want to believe, maybe, someone has finally “seen” you.

The reception is over at 10 and all that is left for that night is an empty hotel room and TV, so you drive him to a local bar famous for its moth-eaten bear head, which hangs on the wall in your line of vision, just over his right shoulder. Still hoping, you search and prod with words till he recounts his pact with young friends to commit suicide at 35, which he obviously never kept.

And you know there’s no hope with a man who views life so cheaply and actually believed he might keep such a pact, and as he argues, you wonder why your friend thought you two should meet, so you start to yawn and he gets it and you drive back to his car. But still you lean forward in an instant, giving in as women sometimes do, as we hate to admit we do, to that silent expectation on his part. You, hoping still for something redeeming, but your eyes fly open at the sudden clumsy attack to your mouth.

And then you are just there, with what should have been a kiss to encapsulate a hot summer’s day of love and pledges and gifts and renewal, but with a kiss as empty as the parking lot—or a golf course at midnight.