Nothing helped. Brij flung the wheelie bin like a high-heeled stiletto before he hit the car. Jay’s blood, in a speedy escapade, didn’t look back even once at the room it’d shared with Jay. Air turned a grey-goose, cut open on shards and burrs, inhaled their last gasps.
Nobody remembered. The world didn’t dismantle. For Jay, it was a sub-conscious thing, a deep isolation numbing him to all happiness. A baby’s coming heals, said the family. He wished it did. The truth is, that day, he jumped signals like disco ball pinatas. Brij had stormed out of the neonatal ward in another neighborhood, like a sudden tropical disturbance in warm ocean water, his brokenness spilling rage on the nurse, almost whispering of the baby’s going. The sons they were learning to call joy or grief, grew up to look like their fathers. Fathers like sun, strong enough to be felt forever, never touched.
Nothing stayed. When you see the phantom white light, a different kind of darkness consoles. It kissed them, encompassed them, then let them go…into the deluge. Emotions they held so dearly dissolved like sunflowers in a swarm of bees. It does matter which one was your dad. It matters that on some nights, you sneak behind the priscilla curtains, talking into the lushness of a karmic fog, both his heart and feet. But what matters like nothing else is to know, when in the traffic, be aware of your being in the traffic. Witness it like a Lego gameboard, parlay with the arches and bricks. Or like a mute play, not la-la, but lila, you set your pace and melody to. What matters is to know that breath insists on running only as long as you’re breathing.
Shweta Ravi (she/her) is an educator and writer from India. She was shortlisted in the Strands International Flash Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in contemporary literary journals like Bending Genres, Reflex Fiction, Hearth & Coffin, Feral Poetry and Versification. She enjoys incarnating in unknown lives until her own ghost insists on claiming her back.
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