| Ashwini Shenoy | January 2025 | Flash Fiction |
I watch her walk away with a faint smile on her face, her shoulders relaxed as if she has dropped the weight she carried onto the seat across from me before leaving. She turns around one last time to say goodbye, and I wave back. If all goes well, I will never see her again.
As the sound of her heels fades away, I am enveloped by the sterile silence of the room. The room, with its steely gray walls, appears smaller than the first time I saw it, just a week ago. Perhaps the room is the same, and I am different.
I wait for the signal—a dying hum.
Now I’m free to think. To feel. To admit.
My first day here had been the happiest day of my life. After years of rejection, revision, and retries, I was selected from over a hundred medically and legally suitable applicants for this job—the most reputed, revered, and lucrative job in the world: The Listener.
But this is not a destination, just an opportunity to make the most of. My time here is limited. I have just moved on from an uphill journey, reached the summit, and am now on my downhill path. The time at the summit is minuscule. My only task now is to delay reaching the base. It is inevitable but delayable.
Staying here longer implies helping more people, saving more people—not necessarily from death, but more from themselves. On that first day, my adrenaline-fueled, overconfident self had resolved to stay here the longest—six months, eleven days. The record holder was a gifted Listener, someone with a different kind of mind, bestowed at birth.
This job demands more than mere listening; it requires one to say more without saying too much. I’m given a hundred words for each sixty-minute session. With these words, I can save a life, reduce the ticking in someone’s mind, give hope where there is none, or make someone fall in love. But not with me. That’s not allowed.
The neurochip pricked into my brain knows everything. It’s an omnipotent overseer, depriving me of feeling anything during the session. It is God. Yet today, as she spoke, something stirred within me—a flicker of rebellion against its control.
I await today’s grade. God’s word is final.
I drift back to today’s session with the woman whose weary eyes and trembling voice revealed a soul weighed down by the modern world. I held her hand, looked into her eyes, and did what I was best trained for—I listened.
She poured her heart out, crying tears of frustration and pain. I did not use any of my words today. I just listened, lost in her words. And somewhere during our conversation, I felt the desire to be a part of her world, her life, her.
God buzzed softly—a reminder of the code.
I sat up and blinked before gesturing for her to continue. She was now weeping, and I felt my throat clench. Her pain was no different from that of the others I had sat with this week. But somehow, hers felt real, big, personal. Unlike the others, she was not alone. She had everything, yet nothing she had mattered.
She was beautiful. Her face bore the gentle traces of time—fine lines around her lips and streaks of gray in her hair. For a split second, despite the warning buzz in my head, I let my eyes slip south of her face to the mole between her collarbones. A new desire rose.
I felt the first crack in my resolve.
Vulnerability is hard to handle. Maybe that’s why people find it hard to listen. When you listen, their shield shatters, their guard lowers, and they are seen for what they truly are. Not everyone can handle another being’s real self. It’s easier to talk more, talk louder, and drown out the unpleasant.
I knew our time together was limited, and she hadn’t found what she had come for yet. So I did what I had never done before. I slowly pulled up my sleeve and displayed my truth. She looked at the raw, fading lines on my wrist, then my eyes, and then the lines again. She studied them some more, and I let her create a story in her mind, a story that would lessen her pain. A story that could intertwine our lives on the vines of shared pain.
And then she bawled like a child who, after a sudden, painful fall, has spotted her mother. In that moment, we were the same—a pair of scars, healing in their own time while the nonchalant world rushed past, doing its own thing.
She wiped her face after that, composed herself and smiled. There was a new lightness to her, as if she had made a decision. Then we just sat there, looking into each other for the rest of the session. There was nothing more to be said or heard.
Now, in retrospect, I wonder what story she had formed in her mind. A connection of our pasts, a screenshot of the present or the possibility of a distant future? Had my scars conveyed what my lips were not allowed to?
When the timer chimed at the end of the hour, she bowed, thanked me, and left. Watching her leave, I felt my heart sink. My body struggled to follow my mind’s instructions. My heart yearned to call her back. My hand twitched slightly, an unconscious gesture of longing. But I did nothing. Letting God decide.
The buzz of the neurochip interrupts my thoughts. God is ready.
The result appears. I’ve failed.
I’ve glided to the base.
I’m human again. I smile, a mixture of relief and melancholy settling within me. With one last glance at the room which has been my lifelong goal until this point, I rush out toward my new dream in her direction, praying she had got our story right.
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Ashwini Shenoy is an Indian author best known for her debut novel, Shikhandini – Warrior Princess of the Mahabharata (Leadstart, 2019) which received critical acclaim worldwide, with its Tamil translation rights sold in 2024. Her second novel, Gift of Life (Leadstart, 2021), explores themes of hope, acceptance, and healing during the pandem. Shenoy’s latest novel, In the Golden Mountains (Holistic, 2024), is a coming-of-age drama filled with suspense, romance, and adventure. Her experimental short stories have been published in numerous national and international magazines.
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Feature image by Hans Eiskonen via Unsplash
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What a beautiful story! Thank you for writing it.