That summer we collected a bag full of sea-shells. You insisted on only the unbroken ones, caressing the well-rounded ones and frowning at the ones with even a slight dent or a corner chipped away. I thought the broken ones were beautiful too, perfect in their edginess, but you said they would be wobbly on the mantelpiece. We ran after lazy seagulls, driving them away to spot a small shell underneath their wings. Every time you held up a shell to your ear, listening to the distant thunder of the waves echoing inside its brittle folds, your eyes greyed until they paled to a pinch of salt, stirred and dissolved into a pail of saline water, your cheeks suddenly salty, your nose warm as though a seagull has just hatched an egg in a sandpit in a far-off beach. I asked, is it always the same story? You nodded, not just the story. The music, the decor, the weather, the footprints, the shadows, the pages turned over at the same gaps, the identical dog-eared bookmarks, the exact underlines. I held up one to my ear but all I heard was the trail of your voice, caught in the best acoustics of the best auditorium in town.
This summer I returned to empty the remaining sea-shells on the beach, the ones broken and dented, or uneven at the edges like the nibbled corners of a stale corn tart. The mantelpiece is dusty, but I like it that way. The dust sits in the exact shapes and sizes of the shells returned home. Are you sure the beach is their home, I had once asked you. If they grow roots and you have to tug at them to pick them up, then that’s home.
This summer I planted them all back home.
Shrutidhora P Mohor (born 1979) is an author from India writing literary fiction.
She has been listed in several competitions like Bristol Short Story Prize, the Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, the Retreat West monthly micro competitions and the quarterly competitions, the Retreat West Annual Prize for short story, the Reflex Fiction competition, Flash 500.
Her writings have been published by several literary magazines and been nominated for Best Micro fictions 2023 and the Pushcart Prize 2024.
Mohor (she/ her) is the pen name for Prothoma Rai Chaudhuri, MA Ph D, Faculty, Department of Political Science, St Xavier’s College, Calcutta, India.
Her Twitter handle is @ShrutidhoraPM and her Instagram username is @shrutidhorap and on Facebook she is @Shrutidhora P Mohor
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