Pihu was not a question-spurting-fountain child. Unlike her sibling. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have them. Those questions. She was a secret-bagful-of-questions child. The nondescript owner of a magic bag heavy with questions, somehow buoyant. They didn’t get lost like keys in a cluttered purse. She never had to fumble for them.
Why she kept them there is unclear. Maybe she thought they were less cute or intelligent than her sibling’s. Maybe no one indulged them. Maybe she didn’t like ready-to-eat stuff. Or perhaps she could float on it, as on a secret magic carpet.
Whenever she came across an answer, the correct question would pop out of the bag of its own accord. She’d paste them side by side in her private encyclopaedia. The answer on the left page, the question on the right. The order was important to her because sometimes, having received an answer, the question would grow a horn or a tail or a limb. She wanted them to veer right.
For instance, once, when her mother was telling someone that it was considered inappropriate for women of her previous generation to smile at the camera, she stumbled upon the answer to why her dadi, who had died before her birth, wore a formidable look in the picture framed on the wall. But there was a spurt of branching limbs on the pasted question. Did not smile mean look angry? Was she pressed to pose? Was she resenting the direction? She kept searching for answers in her mother’s unending anecdotes, and then, forgot about it.
Years later, someone asked her to flash her best demure smile for a matrimonial proposal. She smiled, plastic, and knew: how a face obliged to be arranged goes for its own rearrangement. Was that not smile still travelling?
C. Oulens is an emerging poet and former academic. Winner of “Annual Poe-It Like Poe 2025” poetry contest, her works appear in The Broken Spine, Lothlorien Journal, The Candyman’s Trumpet, The Starbeck Orion, SHINE International, Eunoia review, TiaC, Spillwords, FromOneLine, Verseve, SciFanSat, The BookBag, Sixty Odd Poets and haiku journals.
* dadi: paternal grandmother
No comments:
Post a Comment