| Sneha Thomas | January 2025 | Flash Fiction |
Rajamma’s fingers would no longer be the same again. Those fingers had brushed the silvery-veined leaf hiding in the dense, green lush. She instantly felt something bizarre about it. It was heavier and softer than the others. It was cold and vibrating as if holding a pulse. She started staring at it, recalling a whisper of legend her grandmother had once told her — “the last leaf,” a leaf that grants vision of the land’s spirit to those who find it, a calling to be the protector of the land. The estate strictly forbade her from taking more than her allotment, but still, she pocketed that.
That evening, she made tea from that mystical leaf she found, and the earthy scent filled her tiny, dark room. The world flowed before her eyes as she sipped, her stuffy walls vanishing into pictures from another era. She found wildlife-rich forests and pure rivers that had not been touched by humans and peacefully led their paths — where her ancestors lived peacefully with the ground and offered their devotion to the soil underneath.
Another vision of the present quickly took its place, showing the estate owner standing on the hills and negotiating with faceless investors. His words were loaded with greed. She saw her coworkers and herself, their backs hunched from years of picking, their faces exhausted and ill, condemned to a life that brought them little more than money and exhaustion.
Oh, God!
She trembled at the last vision. The plants were turning to fragile sticks, and the land was parched and dreary. The soil moaned under the weight of loss and decay, and silence coated the hills. Knowing that if nothing changed, this was the future for her people made her heart burn.
As the visions disappeared, Rajamma looked down to see the burnt and dried leaf in her cup. She was filled with a fierce resolution that made her gather the workers the next day and call on them to support her. As she explained the leaf’s warnings, they all listened in silence, some terrified, some optimistic. Her voice carried the echoes of the land that gave birth to them all, the hills, and her ancestors.
She was aware of the dangers. However, she murmured to the land, “It will not be forgotten,” as she buried the crumbling remains of the Last Leaf beneath her family’s ancestral tree, hoping that one day someone would discover it and figure out how to preserve their world.
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Sneha is a passionate social worker, researcher, writer, singer, and painter whose work expresses her love for the arts and the natural world. She is also a published academic, with a paper featured in the International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research. She finds calm in the Western Ghats when she’s not writing or researching, often with a book by her side, a canvas waiting for her brushstrokes, or a cup of coffee. Her bond with nature, where she also gets musical inspiration, feeds her artistic endeavors.
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Feature image by Tatiana Mokhova via Unsplash
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