The Pigeon-Pea Princess of Sanganakallu

by Rosaleen Lynch | Aug 4, 2022 | flash fiction

The pigeon-pea, that lies under seventeen cardboard mattresses, grew in the stone age, amongst wild animals, and traveled across time and continents, and out of a store-bought box, as others poured into a clay pot to simmer as dahl on my fire, for me to feel it now. I’m tough skinned I’m told, by a father and husband after hidings, before I learn to bark or bite or fly or hide, out of sight, so they can’t take aim, train their weapons on me to hunt and treat me like their prey.

The pigeon-pea, through my cardboard mattresses, digs into my hip, until I move, and now my back, until I move, and now my thigh, until I move, and turn tail, switching round but it catches my shoulder, and I move aside and sleep, until it wakes me, grazing the back of my neck, the light of the factory recycle centre warming my face, like the sun that’s not risen yet on the day.

The pigeon-pea is there, I know, but I can’t find it, though I lift each layer, run my hand along the corrugations, the sounds of the stacking machines starting and I consider starting afresh, finding material for a new bed, seeing as the caretaker lets us take what we like as long as we don’t sleep there past night—a building of cardboard needs just one stray spark—and we’re just cut-outs that will go up with it in flames, we’re not etched into the landscape like the animals of the Sanganakallu, we’re temporary and too easily biodegradable, recycled before we’ve found our first use.

The pigeon-pea used to grow where birds, wild dogs and long-horned sambar deer roamed, around the pottery factories of the Sanganakallu, and fire made the pot it cooked in on the fire, that saved the perishable from the spoil. But new people to the street don’t always know how to use such bounty. Here where cardboard grows, they try to sell it to removal companies for packing, or to recycle, or end up setting it on fire. And even then, I tell them to make logs of it, to roll and bind the cardboard tight and the work is warm while waiting for the fire to light. But some don’t want to work. Some want quick fire and it goes out as they lose interest and move on. Others just want to watch things burn. I used to set things alight, make a bonfire of my life. Rake over the ashes in the morning trying to remember what I’d burned, what I’d razed to the ground in the heights of my ambitions to be free. Now I learn how a factory can make. I learn how to build myself a cardboard house, from the inside out, sustainable, piece by piece, that I will one day inhabit. But for now I use twine to bind my cardboard mattresses into a bed and the newspaper lines on pages, to line the layers, as insulation from the cold concrete of the street. I used to feel nothing, take whatever would make me numb. I could sleep anywhere, without food or heat. Now I have logs and a pot to make a fire and dahl. Now when I sleep, even on seventeen cardboard mattresses, I feel one dried pigeon-pea.

You call me your princess and tell me I have to feel, but now I worry and wonder about these boxes, these cardboard coffins, big enough to make beds and rooms and palatial eco-homes and I ask you how far have we come up the archaeological layers, from Neolithic houses on ash mounds, and rocks bearing bulls in petroglyphs of sun circles with horns or interlocking bulls making a sunflower in Sanganakallu? I tell you that a bull can shake off the yoke that has it plough the same furrows where the bodies of cows are buried, their bones picked clean and broken shards sharing the soil with the sickle blades and ground-stone axes and the pottery pieces that were once earth, that liquid rock of clay, malleable until dried out like the pigeon-pea. And you call me your princess and I tell you—listen. I am my own princess. I am my own pigeon-pea. I am my own Sanganakallu.

Your Mother Imagines You Dead

by Bethany Marcel | Jul 25, 2022 | flash fiction

She imagines you dead in the bathtub. The split second you slide under. The gasp. The sputter. She catches you, placing her hands around your tiny waist, your body like a slippery fish. She lifts you up and presses you to her chest.

She imagines you dead as she walks up the stairs with you in her arms.

She imagines you dead when she sees it in her mind only: her foot, cushioned in a sock, slips on the edge, and the two of you tumble down. Two bodies. One big and unwieldy. One so small it would be crushed by the weight of her.

She wants you to sleep. She’s obsessed with the idea of sleep. She fantasizes about it so hard it keeps her awake at night. Sleep, she thinks. Just sleep. When you finally do, she imagines you dead. She checks the clock. 7:30 a.m. You couldn’t possibly sleep so late. Are you breathing? Should she check? She imagines you dead as she tiptoes quietly into your room, as she peers over your crib to find your limbs sprawled out like a teddy bear. When a few seconds later you cry, she breathes, then she whispers it—shit— because now you are the second worst thing: awake.

Anxiety believes if she rehearses tragedy she’ll prevent tragedy. Her therapist tells her this. The anxiety, the therapist says, is telling her body a story. But she’s never liked stories, has never liked the body. Instead, she’s always held to the rough edges of her anxiety. She’s always believed if she holds on tight enough her thoughts might save her.  

She imagines you dead at dinner. In the kitchen. When you’re eating the piece of cheese. When you’re eating the piece of meat. When you’re eating the tortilla and the raspberry she’s cut in half. When you’re drinking from the sippy cup and you cough so softly your dad doesn’t even notice. She imagines you dead when your dad says, “She’s drooling a lot” and she looks in your mouth and says, “What’s that?” then reaches in and pulls out a small piece of a nylon dog bone. You weren’t even choking, she thinks, so how could she think you were dying?

She’s your mother. She doesn’t need a reason to imagine you dead.
She imagines you dead when she goes to work and leaves you with the babysitter.
When she goes to work out at the gym and leaves you in the little daycare area with the long staircase and thinks, “Do they know the dangers of staircases?”

She imagines you dead in the summertime: heat exhaustion. In the wintertime: frostbite. She imagines you dead in the car. That half second before she looks in the rearview mirror and sees you smile.

She imagines you dead before all of this. When you’re still part of her. When she’s so used to the feel of your kick against the inside of her body that she presses her hand to her stomach, tracing the movement of you like piano keys. Those days you stopped kicking, briefly, and she first imagined you—

But that was early on. How she already loved you enough to imagine you dead. “I note you equate love with these anxious thoughts,” the therapist says.

She imagines you dead when you’re even smaller than this. When you’re the size of—she reads it online—a blueberry. She imagines you dead when she goes to pee. When, for months, every time she pees she also pauses, looking for blood in the toilet water. Blood on the toilet paper. She’s waiting for blood because she doesn’t think you are possible. Because she can’t imagine a world kind enough to let you live. Because she can’t imagine her body is kind enough until it is.
Someday, if life is kind, she’ll die before you. Someday, if life is kind, you will be the one to answer the phone call. The hospital room will be stuffy, too small, and not what she deserved. You will remember the silence, the incessant beeping of the monitors. You will slip your hand into hers and hope she knows.   

But first, before all of this, she will continue to imagine you: dead, dead, dead, dead. Will she do this for the rest of her life? Imagining all the various ways you might die?

She doesn’t know. For now, what she knows is this. She imagines you dead even as you fill every empty space with life. Each morning, she goes to you. The light in your nursery is golden and promising. She breathes it in, sucking in the life of it.

Shed This Skin

by Annie Frazier | Jul 18, 2022 | flash fiction

Tonight, I make my return to the water. The weather is warm, the moon full, the time right again to take stock of all I’ve removed and dropped into the deep black lake behind my home.

I wrote and sunk the first message a decade ago, now. Recorded my confession on paper, rolled it scroll-like, slid it down the throat of an empty glass Coke bottle, reattached the crimped red cap with noxious globs of superglue. The thick curved glass magnified and distorted the tight coil of my secret—

My Dear,

You aren’t real, so now’s the time to write. I’ve tried wanting you, willed myself to feel the rush of gooey hormones. I fail. And fail again. If you ever do come clawing into the world, you won’t know this secret. I’ll transform. Surely I will. I’ll shed this skin and glow with expectation. I’ll wear new skin—warm—to which you’ll press round cheeks. Surely. Surely I won’t fail even at this if you ever arrive?

With love I cannot fathom—  

I fetched cement mix and a bucket and cooking spray and a hammer, the last a housewarming gift from my father. I stirred water into the dust, pressed the sealed bottle into enveloping gray slop, scattered a fistful of shimmering blue marbles across the sticky surface and mashed them down secure, one by one. Next day, once mud had set to stone, I gripped tight the hammer’s handle, busted the bucket, peeled away greased plastic and stashed the heavy gray plug in the darkest corner of the garage until the next full moon, when I hefted it to the lake and plunked it into the water and watched my secret slip fast away.

Took a year for me to make another confession—a memory of a man, recurring dream with no ending, a wispy haunting. Three lines of text, and then: roll, slide, glue, mix, bust, peel, heft, plunk, disappear.

Secrets flowed out of me quarterly for a few years, then monthly. I sunk them all, good riddance, careful removal of my dark gnawing parts.

I crafted a placid smile, went about life. Wife. Friend. Worker.

Then the baby came, pulling much from me, reshaping my body soft. Mother.

I adored the baby from moment one. I did and I do. She and my husband and me, molded into family, a new set of selves in the world. So much more to tear and carve and hollow, though—plunk plunk plunk, discarding myself piece by piece into the lake.

So little left, I hardly recognized my new sleekness, the gaunt whittled thing I’d become.

All that time, I’d hoped to muffle the noise of my secrets underwater. Instead, I heard a new sound. Always in my ears, that lapping of lake water against pebbled shore: waiting in the carpool line, arguing with passion at PTA meetings for longer recess periods and music and art and story-time, watching my darling toddler-chubby girl struggle to learn first and second position in her pink tights and tiny black leotard sagging at the rear. Always in my ears—a faint whoosh and trickle, calling.

So I bought a diving light and began to visit my scattered, sunken selves on full moon nights in summer only. Each year, winter has frozen the lake and desiccated me. I’ve spent the cold months gulping water from a bottle refilled hourly, spreading thick lotion over scaly skin, filling baths nearly to the tub’s brim. Me sliding under the surface, closing my eyes, holding my breath. Seconds and minutes stacking like bricks on my chest. I’ve gotten good at it, learned to be still within myself, learned I can wait and wait to breathe again.

Sometimes I hear the muted tones of my daughter’s voice lilting, Ma-ma Ma-ma, from the other side of the bathroom door. And shortly thereafter my husband’s deep rumble—Mama’s resting. Let’s let her rest.

Tonight, I make my return to the water. Well after midnight, family asleep, I shed my clothes and loosen my braided hair. The air is thick and summer-damp though it’s only early June. I walk down the sloped yard to the lake, moonlight silvering my skin, mouse-brown hair wisping at my waist. Bare feet against pine straw. Sick-sweet scent of a neighbor’s dryer sheets vented into the night. The banter of two owls.

From the creaking dock, I survey the black water, the surface stillness, the mist rising wraithlike. My skin glows bright and I arc my body to dive, breaking the surface with hardly a splash.

I swim down down down, releasing air in mercurial little beads, and when I reach bottom, I turn on the diving light—thousands of blue marbles glinting, enlivening the jagged graveyard I’ve made of myself.

I touch fingers to my stones. Slip of green algae, grit of cement. I know each one.

Hair floating gauzy, I press my feet into sludgy lake-bottom, launch myself toward moonlight and break back into air, gasping but full. I dive again. Again. Again. I dive until I no longer need to gulp air above the water’s surface, dive until my body feels silver-skinned, flattened and thinned, sliding swift and silent through murky water, between sunken tombs. Home again and nearly whole.