Debut Fiction: 'Wreckage' by Ayesha Bedi

There was no runway to takeoff from, no pilot in command. 

It was a flight ordained entirely by a mighty gust of wind and a faulty clothes peg. 

The teal lace bikini bottom had travelled by air before. But that journey had been stifling. Lying folded in a vacuum-sealed pack, wedged between fellow travellers cut from the same cloth, jostled by pre-monsoon turbulence over the Indian Ocean. 

It had been an ordeal, really. 

But this afternoon, as ominous grey clouds blotted out the sun, water fell, first in splinters and then in streams until the whole city struggled to stay afloat. Airplanes diverted in the sky, while below, on a 19th floor balcony, laundered pastels billowed violently until a canary yellow peg snapped open, releasing the teal lace undergarment for good. 

Lifting off weightlessly, the petite piece of lace immediately gave in to the navigation of the wind, pirouetting like a dancer. It floated across neighbourhoods, taking in the views and its freedom, until a light drizzle began to languidly weigh it down. Up and down went the triangle-shaped bird of teal lace in a seemingly unending battle between the wind and the rain.

Finally succumbing to its newfound heft, it tore through an open window and into the bedroom of strangers. 

A discreet island of blue mesh in a small puddle of water, it crashed beneath the strangers’ bed and lay there unnoticed, oblivious to the accusations and arguments it would soon incite. 

Once discovered, the teal lace underwear would no doubt be doomed to landfill. But before that, it would wreck more than the wood-paneled floor already staining from the water it brought in.