| Rituparna Mukherjee | October 2024 | Flash Fiction |
You wake up to footprints on your body, hooves and claws traversing its length, bleeding purple. The fierce sun outside mellows through the air vents in your room with the pale green walls and creates pretty patterns. You luxuriate in its beauty. You try to recall last night, and you hear the sound of the sea, remember how his tremulous breaths sounded like waves to you, wafting in and out of your ear in a rhythm and you long to stand on warm sand and hear the seagulls squawk. His voice comes to you wordless, garbled, in a low hum at the nape of your neck. You think of him lying on his stomach on your queen bed, his back dotted with moles, his long fair fingers flicking through the phone, one foot atop another, humming a tune to himself that you can barely hear, much less decipher, and you think how he could turn you inside out like the socks he threw casually inside his shoes once he stepped inside your top-floor apartment. You remember the laughter. You recall its hollowness. His feral eyes with occasional affection brim to the surface, bright and orange, like when you have your eyes shut tight in the sun. But most of all, you recollect your frenzied attempts at airing the room when he was gone, hoping the warm air outside would take away the smell of cigarettes inside your room, breathing in deep the pillow covers that reeked of his armpit, stowing it in some distant corner of your neural pathways to be fetched at a later date while the rain lashed your city, washing the bed spread and hanging it out to dry, wiping clean the walnut surfaces. You find it strange that this is all you can summon. Each time he scoops more of you. Each time you remember less. You are exhausted, parts of your body wrung out in harmonious pain. Meanwhile the heated land air barges inside your cool room through gaps in the window. The room will soon smell of dry cement and old paint as the sun goes up. You barely have time before reality seeps in. You strip away and look at yourself in patches of light and darkness. You move round and round and inspect the spaces of your body you must hide. You select an elbow-sleeved crew neck tee-shirt, and shorts that reach your knee. You camouflage the redness of your face with tinted serum. You lie back on your bed and cover yourself in the thin white bedsheet. The silence envelops you. You snip the love in your heart into tiny, little pieces and stow them safe in boxes to be retrieved on idle evenings that amble too quickly when he’s here. You don’t wonder about why he comes to you anymore. Your curious heart isn’t expectant anymore. The doorbell rings. You feel too naked at the thought of the sun outside. You know the purple glistens a night blue in its light. You hastily cover yourself. Your mind alert, you step outside the room. The floor outside is quicksand.
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Rituparna Mukherjee teaches English and Communication Studies at Jogamaya Devi College, Kolkata. She is a published poet, short fiction writer and enjoys writing flash fiction. A multilingual translator, translating Bengali and Hindi fiction and poetry into English, her work has been published in many international journals of repute. She is the chief editor at The Antonym Magazine. Her first complete work in translation, The One-Legged, translated from Sakyajit Bhattacharya’s Ekanorey has been published by Antonym Collection publishing in January 2024.
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Feature image by Annie Spratt via Unsplash
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