'Nothing Left That Recognizes Us' by Kumar Sen

We made a list because lists suggest an ending.

1. One house, returned in parts. Walls sweating. The floor remembering river. 
2. Four plates (one chipped in the shape of a country that no longer exists, or never did). 
3. A door that does not close but continues practicing. 
4. My brother’s shoes. When lifted, they release a sound like someone finishing a sentence. 
5. A photograph of a woman we agree is our mother, though she looks relieved to be elsewhere. 
6. One clock (kitchen), keeping a time that does not include us. 
7. Neighbours, reduced to voices that arrive before their bodies. 
8. A cupboard of spices, louder now. Turmeric staining even the air. 
9. A form asking for losses in numbers. We write: still happening. 
10. The river, gone but not finished. It leaves thin instructions in the mud. We step where it tells us, even indoors. 
11. Sleep, in fractions. Dreams where the house is dry and refuses us entry. 
12. A knocking that begins just before morning. Not at the doors—inside the walls, as if something is checking for space. 
13. The sense that something was misplaced before the flood, and the water has only clarified it. 
14. Our names, briefly unfamiliar in our own mouths. 
15. Tomorrow, already used. 

We keep adding to the list.
This is how we will know when it’s over:
there will be nothing left that recognizes us.

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Kumar Sen is a writer from Kolkata, India. His work has appeared in Reading into Culture, Unbroken Journal, New World Writing Quarterly, and Flare Magazine. Trained as a mathematician, he writes in Bengali and English, exploring sensory detail and the subtly absurd. He is also a musician, composer and bibliophile.