I recognise it. Then I recognise him.

The man is my neighbour.

He drops the robe.

From my balcony, I see him—clothed—doing laundry on his balcony.

Singing and smoking, he hunches over a big bucket of water with a toilet plunger. 

Here, he gives no sign of recognising me.

I avoid his grey eyes and purplish-red genitalia. 

On his laundry days, he plunges, squelches and slops, twists and wrings out the clothes.

He gives the class a standing pose with hand on hip. Defiant.

I’ve seen this stance before, when the superintendent curses him for doing laundry outside, and yells why, why when our building has a perfectly nice room with sinks, new appliances, and even ironing boards.  

After the washing, my neighbour hangs his clothes on ropes tied to the railing. The bathrobe dances, khaki pants and plaid shirts swing. A once-white T-shirt insists, “Kiss me, I’m 70”. Black underwear billows in the wind and sometimes flies.

His next pose is seated and features a prop.

I recognise the stick he holds; leaning far over the railing, he uses it to pick up undies that have fallen to the ground.   

With my eraser getting smaller and smaller—little bits are everywhere—fortunate it is that there are only two positions left in the session. As the superintendent knows well, my neighbour isn’t easy.    

The first is head upon hand. Stoic as if it’s a cloudy day on the balcony. Reflective. Because everything is taking forever to dry, there’s too much time to think.

The second pose is face in hands as if now despairing.

I don’t know what could be wrong or even what my neighbour’s name is, but this is definitely not the moment to ask nor to introduce myself. Like me, the model is vulnerable and is creating.

Karen Walker writes and draws and paints in Ontario, Canada. Her recent work is in Does It Have Pockets, SoFloPoJo, antonym, Weird Lit, Full House Literary, and Gooseberry Pie Lit. 

Abby Frucht won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize for 1987 and has since published eight books of fiction as well as numerous essays in newspapers and magazines nationwide. Her book of poetry, Maids, tells the story of the author’s thoughts and recollections of the women who kept house for her parents when she was a girl on Long Island in the 1960’s and 70’s. She is also the winner of a Best of the Web Award for her essay, “Blue Shirt.” The reissued and enhanced version of Abby Frucht’s The Bell the End of a Rope is available now at Dzanc Books, and you can find her at www.abbyfrucht.net

Curtis Smith: Congratulations on the re-release of The Bell at the End of a Rope. I’ve read a lot of your work, but I’d missed this book—and I really enjoyed these stories. Can you tell us how you hooked up with Dzanc for this project?

 Abby Frucht: Over the years, Dzanc has brought out other of my books, including Snap, Fruit of the Month, and Licorice, as parts of their e-book series, so when the idea of approaching them came to me I simply wrote them and asked if they would like to release another, to which they immediately answered that they would be delighted.  I was, and am, delighted too.  Dzanc has a terrific authors list, as you’ll see if you visit   https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/ebook of which I’m proud to be a part.  I’m also proud to be a human rather than a robot, and when I asked Dzanc whether they would add one of the Authors Guild’s new Human Authored Certification icons to the The Bell at the End of a Rope‘s new cover (Dzanc always makes great, eye-catching covers) they said yes to that too, in part, I  bet, because Snap, Fruit of the Month, and Licorice turn out to be three of the multiple hundreds of thousands of works downloaded  by Anthopic for the training of AI  in breach of copyright law.  So here we are, Dzanc and me, co-class members in the ongoing Anthropic Copyright settlement, awaiting our albeit small financial restitution along with, I hope, a lasting satisfaction.

CS: The collection was originally published in 2012—and I can’t tell if 2012 feels like forever ago or yesterday. As you worked on this re-release and revisited the collection, did the work catch you off guard in any way? Do you think you’re a different writer now? Has your process changed? If so, how?

AF: Yikes. That’s a tough one. But, Am I a different writer?  How could I not be? How couldn’t we all?  Barack Obama was president, then, my sons already come of age, my teaching job, from which I’m now for years retired, a giant part of each day.  I’m a cross-country-driving grandparent, now, my country and my sleep in nightly disarray, my jeans the same cut as ever but my mind still sorting some next steps out. Has my process changed?  As somebody who for the first time in her life is undergoing what can most accurately be called Writers Block, I will say that it must be, under cover of a certain, not frustrating, darkness. When and if I start writing again, I think I’d like to experiment with form giving rise to content, for a spell, rather than the other way around, in hopes of bringing to the page content that I might not otherwise have known lay in waiting to be found. Does that mean I’ll be writing more poetry than prose?  I don’t know. When I was first teaching, genre was largely fixed, program-wise.  Enrollees, applications, and academic notations were genre specific; students concentrated in either poetry or fiction and left with degrees in one or the other. But genres are fluid, intersectional, and I would like to seek fluency within and surrounding that overlap. I realize this is an abstract answer.  It needs to be, since my thoughts on this topic , rather than seeking definition, are reveling, for now, in a delicious uncertainty.

Was I caught off guard, you ask, by what I saw in The Bell at the End of the Rope when it came time to reissue it? Not caught off guard so much as glad that Dan Wickett, my editor there, allowed me room to revise a few lines here and there and even add three stories, two of which were written after the collection first was published and the third of which, “Bride,” was the subject of an email I received from a reader just after the Narrative edition came out. “What happened to ‘Bride’?” I remember it read.  “It’s my favorite of your stories. Why isn’t ‘Bride’ included in this collection?” Oh, I realized,  I had forgotten all about it…. although I hope it’s not forgettable.  For it to be Unforgettable, I realize, might be too much to ask.

CS: Going back even further, I remember a lecture you gave at a Vermont College residency where you said that you started as a story writer but after writing a few novels, you found returning to the story form difficult. I’ve thought of that often, because I can take a break from novel writing and do a series of flash stories, but I struggle with the 3,000-5,000-word stories that used to be my main focus. First, why do you think you encountered that struggle—and second, do you still feel that way, or has that changed with time?

AF: Funny you should ask that question, now that I find myself engaging in pieces shorter even than the story forms of which I must have been speaking. I’d as soon embark on a novel, now, as on the writing of a cookbook (I’m do love eating, but just ask my friend, Harriet: Unlike her, I am not a great cook. She once left me a birthday gift at my door, which I regarded with puzzlement before deciding it must be a magazine rack, I put it in the bathroom with magazines in it. Next time Harriet came over, she asked, ‘What’s the roasting rack I gave you for your birthday doing in the bathroom?!)

If I said in my lecture that the choice between story and novel was a struggle, I find now that the question of genre, is not a struggle so much as a method of engagement, a method of toying and contemplating, of trying to marry form and content and in the process, discover something important enough to hitch myself to for the weeks or months it might take me to put it into words.  The questiong of Legibility too is part of this.  I’m not looking for my writing to be legible so much as arresting, worthy of some degree of immersion on the part of the reader. I’m glad to have done this in my book of poetry, MAIDS, but next time I’ll likely take it not quite so far.

CS: I love your openings, how you place us in these situations with these characters who, by the end of the first page, are no longer strangers. I often talk to my students about the opening paragraph—its responsibilities and the work it needs to do. When you’re crafting these beginnings, are there any guidelines you keep in mind?

AF: I’m glad you love my stories’ openings.  Thank you. And I’m glad you asked this question, which isn’t something I’ve really thought so much about, before.  Looking back, and ahead, the principle rule I guess I follow for the opening of a piece, regardless of form or genre, is a relative immutability for a certain length of writing time. When I’m writing a piece, the opening feels to me like a door.  It feels solid, absolute, more dependable, more knowable, more functional, than whatever I might stumble on once I pass through it. So, commit yourself, when you’re writing a piece, to unlocking, opening, and walking through that same door again and again, over and over, to see where it takes you.  Let the door maintain its angle, its directionality, for as long as it can. If it can’t, remake it, as solid, as vivid, as before, and step through it anew.  I say this keeping in mind a meditation session I recently attended. The entire meditation took place along a walk that the leader was describing as we stepped along beside him, seeing and hearing only what he told us to see and hear. I really appreciated being handed a place, and being handed over into it, and learning where it might take me.

CS: I love the idea of the opening as a door—that’s a great visual. Perhaps 2/3 of these stories are in third person and 1/3 are first. Does point of view come to you from the start? Are there certain elements that dictate which POV you’ll use or is it more of a “feel” thing? Do you sometimes start a piece in one voice and then switch?

AF: As above, I generally stay in whichever person I started in, that is, if the piece in progress works in such a way as to keep me going at it. I think the thing that determines person for me is whether I feel more objective or subjective toward the material.  Is it IN me, or am I regarding it from the outside?  And what, and who, am I, the author, in relation to this voice, this invented, other being?  What kind of stake do I have in them, and them in me? Am I working something out, something I myself need to deal with and live with and ponder, or are it and I, the other being and I, engaging in some kind of education or revelation between the two of us? And what’s behind that other being?  What caused me to stick it there on some page in the first place if only to possibly put it aside and file it away and forget about it?  Was I making restitution?  Was I making accusation?  And did the act of filing it away, unseen, allow the voice go silent or just wait, all too patiently, for me to wrestly with it again?

CS: In the introduction, you discuss looking for a lost story. Do you keep all your old notebooks and unpublished stories and novels? I’ve recently started throwing some old things out—but it hasn’t been easy.

AF: Yes I have files upon files of those unfinished piece, even whole novels.  When I look through them I often can’t recall having written them; they feel irrelevant, if amusing, and occasionally even compelling, to me, like someone else’s shopping list I might spot in my cart in the supermarket. Who wrote this, I might wonder? Who is buying  the ingredients for what appears to be the same Papaya Salad I’ve been saving the recipe for for decades but never yet followed, preferring at the last second to simply slicing the imperfectly ripened fruit and eating it not quite fresh as could be? Sometimes I bring the papaya to my neighbor, remembering, always, the neighbor who stood at her threshold and answered, when I offered her a copy of the book I’d been writing outside on my porch all year within view of her house, “Oh no thank you, Abby. We don’t do business with door-to-door salesmen.”

CS: What’s next?

AF: In fact, something that didn’t feel irrelevant last time I browsed through my discarded files.  I don’t know where it will go but it caught my eye and my heart. Somehow, I want to do it justice.

This fall, Curtis Smith’s next two books, this heart (stories) and (step)sisters (a novel), will be released.

Alexandra Burack, author of On the Verge, is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, freelance editor/writing coach, and founder of Ekphrastica, a collaboration among poets and performing/visual artists. Her unpublished full-length collection, Demarcation, was a Finalist for the Unleash Press WIP Award, the Paul Nemser Poetry Prize, and the Long Leaf Press Book Contest. Her recent poems appeared in Pangyrus, Metphrastics, The Ekphrastic Review, Ucity Review, and The Sewanee Review, among other venues. She serves as a Poetry Editor for Iron Oak Editions and Poetry is Currency, and a Poetry Reader for The Adroit Journal, The Los Angeles Review, and West Trade Review/Trill. Her website is https://www.alexandraburack.com.

In my dream, you’re still merely missing, your body not yet recovered, and an etching of hope remains that I will find you. I drive to our grandparents’ house and see your old green Toyota Echo parked in their circular driveway, the car you used to teach me how to drive stick shift when I was 17. I close the chain-linked fence behind me and meet you in the field where we played shepherd as children with the goats and sheep. You stand in the middle of the neglected overgrowth, wearing a white linen shawl. Your forehead still has that gash, your eyes swollen from crying, and your cheeks streaked with tears, but you smile while revealing the tarnished skeleton key we fought over decades ago, a treasure you salvaged from the attic between rotting Christmas decorations and stale cardboard boxes of moth-eaten flannel shirts. Today, you escaped. We won. We embrace and say no words; we don’t have to. No one knows you like I do, and no one knows me like you. We unlock a cellar door leading to a home beneath the grass. I help you down the ladder, and you promise you’ll visit soon when it’s safe. Until then, I close the door and don’t regret every word I didn’t say. But it’s just a dream. That key doesn’t unlock anything. And now I wake to another blood-smeared sunrise I don’t know how to face while carrying all the burning words I could have screamed to save you.

Katie Robinson lives in coastal Virginia with her husband, two sons, and a flock of unruly hens. Sometimes flash and other times traditional short stories, her writing grapples with themes of motherhood, dystopias, violence against women, mental health, place in our physical bodies, and more. Her work is published or forthcoming in Stone Circle Review, Harpy Hybrid Review, Heimat Review, Free Flash Fiction, and Last Light: Apocalypse Poems. She can be found online at www.katierobinsonwrites.com and on Bluesky: ktrobinson.

Right now, magenta-faced toddlers are running this daycare. Where did Miss Brianna and Miss Lauren go? The other toddlers are so scared. See their shining eyes? Hiding behind that curtain, under that couch. Look at the toddlers rejoicing in the chaos, the brutality, shooting their toy machine guns up into the air screaming, “More, more!” and over here, this sobbing three-year-old sitting on top of a pile of Monopoly money as tall as a house, who can’t bear holding this hundred dollar bill because it means he’s not holding that hundred dollar bill. Outside, the flowers are all dying.

But skip forward a page or two. Skip forward five pages. Skip past the toddlers with the rubber knives and toddlers with the cardboard handcuffs and the toddlers in their severe uniforms. Skip past the twisting, looping explosion that folds out to be four times the size of this book, chalk white in the center, then sand, then lemon meringue pie. Marigold and sweet potato and honey. Then burgundy. Charcoal on the edges. Skip past, not that page, not — yes. This one.

Look, their parents have come. See them letting Miss Brianna and Miss Lauren out of the storage closet? Look at them picking up their tired toddlers, gently taking away the plastic guns, the cardboard handcuffs. Oh, these toddlers are so sleepy. They’re ready for a big nap. That Daddy is taking off his toddler’s blue business suit and putting bunny jim-jams on him. How comfy. That Mommy is throwing the Monopoly money into the wind. Look how it’s flying up, up, up, into the air. Look at them driving away, snoozing toddlers in car seats.

Here’s the last page. The toddlers who were hiding from the scary ones have come out from behind the curtains, from under the couches. Look, they’re finger painting. Look. Look.

Sage Tyrtle writes stories unsettling enough for The Offing, yet NPR let them on air. Included in Best Microfiction, Moth GrandSLAM winner, and Pushcart nominee, they’ve taught 150+ workshops for Smokelong Quarterly and Clarion West among others. Their work lives at the intersection of literary craft and, “Wait, did they just say that?” Find stories that linger at tyrtle.com.

JMWW is open for submissions June 1st – 15th. Flash Fiction and Creative Nonfiction will close after we reach 40 submissions. Fiction is closed this month.

We accept submissions from the 1st to the 15th of every month. If a genre is not open, it means we have either reached our submission cap for that month or are on a scheduled break. All submissions are free across every genre, with the exception of paid critiques.

Check out our guidelines and submit new work in Submittable. Send us your best!

Kiyanna Hill is Black poet from Virginia. Her writing has been featured in Porter House Review, Honey Literary, The Maine Review, and Autofocus, and elsewhere. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia State University and is the poetry co-editor of Beyond Bars, a literary journal that publishes the work of those affected by the carceral system.

Photo by author

HMMH.

            The fridge never stops humming. It’s the same pitch as the ringing in my ears.

            Mom pulls a mug from the microwave and slumps on a stool.

            HMMH. Always HMMH.

            She dunks and redunks a teabag. The mug’s from a website where you can slap images on anything. It’s got an ultrasound of Baby River, my kid sister’s kid, from last year.

            “Alrighty then,” she says. “What do you wanna talk about?”

            I hand her an old photo from the bin I sorted this morning. It’s Mom and her boyfriend smoking at a table. She’s got an ’80s perm even though it was the ’90s. She’s looking at him. He’s looking out of frame.

            “You remember what happened with John?” I ask. “We talked about it a few years ago.”

            “Nope, sorry,” she says, swimming in her baggy Eeyore sweatshirt. “I’ve been so confused since the move. Everything’s in the wrong place. It’s all jumbled up.”

            My heart and stomach try to squeeze past each other and get caught in my rib cage.

            “I can’t believe the house is gone,” she says frowning into her mug. “I loved that house. It was my house.”

            This was supposed to be the easy part.

            “The shower at the water park?” I ask.

            She swallows her lips.

            “Mom, he was standing there, naked,” I say. “Dick hard.”

            She dunks and redunks the teabag.

             “What can I say? That whole situation was fucked up,” she says. She rolls her eyes, hunches her shoulders, and raises her hands in surrender. “You know, he and his ex-wife had these parties where — ”

            “Pa-aa-pa! It’s not working!” yells my daughter Olive, almost singing, almost eight, as she bounces into the kitchen. “I can’t see the Switch on the TV.”

            Mom stirs in sugar while Olive and I head to the living room.

            “Can we stay at Aunt Theresa’s and Uncle Corey’s tonight?” Olive asks as I untangle cables and adapters. “It’s too cold here. And Grandma Eileen doesn’t have Preacher Pup.”

            “Grandma Eileen also doesn’t have Baby River,” I say. “Could you sleep with all that crying?”

            Her face flushes.

            “Waah!” I thrash and roll next to her. “Olive, shake rattle! Olive, read story! Not that story! Toilet story! Wahh!”

            “Pa-aa-pa!” she yells. “There’s no story about toilets.”

            I tickle her until she snorts.

            Mom shuffles in and frowns at the tangled cords.

            “Call Corey. He set all this up,” she says. “I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

            “Yay! Uncle Corey!” Olive says.

            “He’s working,” I say, popping that balloon. Okay, I’m a little jealous. “Play on the handheld till lunch. Then we’ll go to the park.”

            “Then we can visit Preacher Pup and see if Uncle Corey is working!” Olive says.

            “Sure,” I say, shrugging like Mom.

            “What can you do?” Mom says as we head back to the kitchen. “The girl likes Preacher Pup, she likes Uncle Corey, and she likes Baby River.”

            I bite my tongue. Mom bankrolled this trip. It’s been two years since I’ve seen Olive in person so I’m not going to pop her balloons.

            HMMH.

            Back in the kitchen, Mom talks more about retiring and selling her house — her house — then wanders off.

            I swallow a shot of whiskey.

            I think about how I leaned against the wall and bent over in that changing room, shivering, waiting for what was supposed to happen next. But John never touched me.

            I swallow another shot.

#

            “Matilda was a girl and she loved cigars,” Olive says. “Now, I wouldn’t judge her, but that’s too much.” She’s reading a Roald Dahl book. Sort of. “She wouldn’t stop talking about cigars. Sorry if it’s weird, but it’s not me. I didn’t draw the pictures.”

            We’re on the guest bed. The AC’s off and the window’s cracked, but the stale air won’t vent.

            “You know, Papa,” Olive says. “They don’t put smoking in children’s books these days even though some kids’ parents smoke.”

            “Olive … that’s great,” I say and spare a balloon. Her confidence outweighs trash talking her mom.

            She falls asleep after Matilda befriends her teacher but before she quits smoking.

            Her body rises and falls. When she was Baby River’s age I’d rest my hand on her and hold my breath to make sure she was still breathing.

            Back in the kitchen, Mom packs away leftovers.

            “It was so nice to see Olive read to Baby River,” Mom says, her face flushed from the cabernet. “We’re a reading family.”

            I toss back the rest of my wine, and go to top off her glass.

            “No more for me,” Mom says. “I won’t be able to stay asleep.”

            She microwaves water for tea and swipes at her phone. Same mug, new photos. Olive and Baby River. Uncle Corey and Baby River. Olive and Preacher Pup. Theresa and Baby River. Mom and Olive and Baby River. None of me. Because I took them.

            Dad wasn’t in the photos I sorted, either.

            “My turn,” I say and pass her another old photo. It’s a picture of me and a guy in the neighbor’s swimming pool. He’s holding me up, thin hair plastered to his head and body. I’m horizontal and thrashing.

            “Who’s that guy?” I ask.

            “One of A.J.’s friends. He taught you to swim,” she says. “Didn’t he help you with your bike, too?”

            Blue chrome frame, yellow seat and handlebars. The alley behind the house. The pothole. “Which head did you bump?” His fingers groping through my jeans. “This is called your head, too.”

            “Oh, he did,” I say. “And that asshole touched me on the … in the … in the alley.”

            Chlorine. His hands. Me flailing.

            “In the pool, too,” I say. “He touched me a lot. In the pool.”

            My heart uses my stomach as a trampoline. I still haven’t gotten to the point.

            “Jesus,” Mom says. “Jesus-Fucking-Christ.” She pulls her glasses away from her face and rubs away tears with her baggy sleeves. “I had no idea.”

            Fine. I hug her.

            “It’s not your fault, Mom,” I hear myself saying.

            HMMH.

            The oven hood light makes the pictures glow. The second one has the same thick, Ohio-gray sky as the first. My heart rattles my sternum. The table’s by the pool. Mom’s watching John. John’s watching me with that guy.

            I finish the bottle of cabernet and swallow a double shot of whiskey.

#

            “What happened to Parmesan John after that?” Olive yells into Corey’s beard.

            “Well, that’s the thing about Parmesan John,” Corey’s beard says. “He’s not the kinda guy who just opens up a restaurant. He gets in the kitchen and gets cooking.”

            Happy Fourth of July. The only fireworks are the box of sparklers I forgot on the dresser when we headed to my sister’s apartment. Mom and me sit at a card table with Corey’s mom in the backyard. Olive watches Corey flip burgers. My sister is upstairs with Baby River. Preacher Pup keeps barking.

            “Preacher Pup, quiet,” Corey’s beard shouts.

            “What happened next?” Olive yells. “What-happened-what-happened-what-happened?” She only drank one can of Coke — pop goes another balloon — but enough apple juice does the trick.

            The downstairs neighbors spray a hose. Their toddler runs through it and squeals.

            “Ya know, ya faddah bawt fresh ketch-chup and mus-durd fah effrey picnic,” Corey’s mom shouts. “Didn’t madda wat wuz inna fridge.”

            The kid’s diaper keeps falling off. He keeps playing with himself.

            “Yeah, Ma, I remember,” Corey’s beard shouts back, then continues with Olive. “The most important thing in any kitchen is quality ingredients. And we all know what Parmesan John liked to cook with.”

            “Parmesan!” Olive screams.

            The neighbors come over. They tower above us and open their mouths. Static hisses out.

            Mom leans over and shouts into my ear. “Thanks again for sorting those old pictures.”

            Preacher Pup keeps barking.

            “You know, I’ve held on to them for three decades,” she shouts.

             There’s more static from the neighbor family. More New England Ds and Rs tumble out of Corey’s Mom.

            “Preacher Pup, quiet,” Corey’s beard shouts.

            My heart sinks into my pelvis.

            There’s my sister with Baby River in her arms.

            “Parmesan!” Olive screams.

            My lungs suck in water.

            HMMH.

            Olive’s asleep. There’s no more whiskey so I swallow a double vodka and join Mom in the living room.

            “Here,” she says, flicking on her phone. Corey playing with Olive and the neighbor’s toddler. Olive lapping up apple juice from a plate. Baby River asleep in my sister’s arms.

            “Mom, I know this sucks,” I say, “but can we talk about another old one?”

            “Oh sure, what the hell,” Mom says, thumbing off her phone and freezing Rachel Maddow on the TV.

            This picture is of a young couple standing in the kitchen of the house my sister and me grew up in. The man’s got hangdog eyes and a long nose above a mustache. The woman has dark, longish hair, but is featureless no matter how hard I stare.

            “That’s your old babysitter, Judy, and her boyfriend Bill,” Mom says. “You and Theresa were in the wedding. Did you find those photos?”

            “Yeah,” I say. “I’m showing you this for the same reason as the other ones.”

            She frowns and shakes her head.

            “All that shit with John and A.J.’s friend? It was familiar,” I say.

            What’s that sound?

            “It was with Judy and Bill.” I say, swallowing. “I think something happened. I can’t, um, I know. Yeah, I know something happened.”

            The living room floods.

            “I can hear Judy laughing and I can feel Bill squeezing me,” I say. “I don’t, I can’t, I don’t remember it clearly, though.”

            I try to stay still like an anchor but I’m floating away.

            “My, uh, my ass hurts when I think about it,” I say.

            I’m at the bottom of A.J.’s pool, holding my breath.

            “Bill was a drinker,” Mom says. “He hit Judy. Maybe you saw that.”

            “Mom, I’ve been scared of men my whole life,” I say. “I thought it was because of Dad shouting all the time. But that’s not just that.”

            Part of me stayed down there at the bottom of the pool.

            “You know, they got divorced,” Mom says. “I guess she’s a lesbian now.”

            “Huh?” I ask.

            “Judy,” Mom says.

            The water’s gone.

            “Did anything strange happen back then?” I say. “A time I started acting weird or something?”

            Mom locks eyes with Rachel Maddow.

            “Well,” she says slowly. “There was that time you came home from school crying and you asked me what ‘gay’ meant.”

            “Huh?” I ask. “When?”

            “Maybe fourth grade,” she says. “I explained it to you, being gay. That it’s okay.”

            “That’s not what I’m talking about,” I say.

            “You know John was into threesomes,” Mom says. “Not with girls.”

            “What an enlightened, cultured guy,” I say.

            “I’m just saying,” she says.

            “Listen,” I say, shaking my head, just like Mom. “I’m not coming out of the closet. I’m talking about being sexually assaulted as a kid. Being molested. Being raped. Got that?”

            “I just want you to be happy,” she says.

            “Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”

            HMMH.

            Another double vodka then bed.

            My eyes pop open. It’s still dark. The sparklers are still on the dresser.

            “Olive, hey, Olive,” I say, rocking her. “Wake up.”

            We stumble, jackets over pajamas, onto the porch. Two lighter clicks and there’s crackling sparks and sulfur smoke.

            “Papa, I drew my name,” Olive says. “See? See?”

            “I see, honey,” I say. “I see.”

#

            “That’s a lot of balloons,” Mom says the next morning. “Are you really going to blow all of them up?”

            “Of course,” I say. I’m a dozen in and already dizzy. “It’s Olive’s birthday.”

            It’s not Olive’s birthday. But I’ll be back in Europe then.

            “Happy birthday to me!” Olive sings jumping on the bed. “Happy birthday to me!”

            She leaps onto my back.

            Mom looks at her vibrating cell phone while I toss Olive on the bed and blow a raspberry on her bellybutton. Mom shoves the phone in my face.

            “It’s the downstairs neighbor, that college girl,” she says. “She wants to know when you’ll be done making noise.”

            “Thuurrrrsday,” I say. That’s when we’re leaving. I bop Olive on the head with a balloon. Orange.

            “I rent this place,” Mom says. “What if she calls the landlord?”

            Olive bops me back, a balloon in each hand. Green. Pink.

            “She’s a college kid,” I say. Orange. Orange. “She’s not calling anybody.” Green. Pink. Green.

            “I have to live with these people,” Mom says. “I can’t just do what I want.” She sounds angry but her cheeks are pushing tears into her eyes.

            HMMH.

            “What’s wrong?” I ask in kitchen.

            “Oh, it’s nothing,” Mom says. She dunks a teabag in her ultrasound mug. “I’m just being stupid.”

            “Quit saying that,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

            “This isn’t my house,” she says, glasses down, rubbing away tears with the baggy sleeves of her Eeyore sweatshirt. “I miss my house.”

            Fine. Hug her.

            That evening, there’s sushi for Olive’s not-birthday dinner. Olive blows out the candles and we eat cake. Then we play school.

            “You get detention!” Olive yells at Mom. “No smoking in class!”

            “Ha-ha, you got detention,” I say.

            “No talking in class, Papa!” Olive yells. “Get in the Chokey!”

            Later that night I corner Mom on the couch.

            “Okay. Last one,” I say.

            She freezes the same Rachel Maddow, different blazer.

            This one’s of my sister and me. We’re standing on the stoop of the house. My right arm’s in a sling.

            “How old was I when it happened?” I ask.

            “Five, I think,” Mom says.

            “What happened that night?” I ask.

            “Judy was supposed to watch you and Theresa while your father and I went to a hotel,” Mom says. “It was our anniversary. It was supposed to be a getaway.”

            “Then what happened?” I say.

            “I guess Bill came over,” she says. “They said you were running away from him at bedtime and he grabbed your arm the wrong way.”

            “Then you took me to the hospital,” I say. “I remember counting the rows of holes in the ceiling tiles. I was wearing my Mickey Mouse pajamas.”

            “No,” Mom says. “That was Judy’s mom.”

            “Huh?” I say. “I remember you there.”

            I’m going to throw up.

            “No. Not that night,” Mom says. “Judy was young. She didn’t know what to do, so she called her mom and she took you to the hospital.”

            I’m going to throw up vodka. And birthday cake. And pool water. Every god damned thing.

            “Why didn’t you come back?” I ask.

            “I wanted to come back, but your father said there was nothing we could do,” Mom says. She rolls her eyes, hunches her shoulders, and raises her hands. “What was I supposed to do?”

            HMMH.

            HMMH. Always HMMH.

            I swallow a double vodka. Then a second. Then I pass out.

            In the morning, Mom helps Olive make pancakes while I put the last not-birthday balloons into garbage bags. Olive and I stomped them until Mom said we had to do it outside because of the downstairs neighbor.

            I hide one under the bed. Red. I’ll pop it later.

Nicholas De Marino (he/him) needs a hug. Poetry in Dreams & Nightmares and Horrific Scribblings. Fiction in BULL and Hell Itself. Read his monthly column (fnord) in foofaraw. ¡Viva SFPA y Codex! No awards but some nominations. More at nicholasdemarino.blogspot.com.

Photo from The New York Public Library, Unsplash

The cyclone did not hit Chennai in November, as predicted, but landed like a gut-punch mid-December, bringing in three days of torrential rain accompanied by thunder, lightning and flooding. Then it was over.

The trees in our garden still stood upright, the coconut, mango and jackfruit trees that had been planted by the British over a hundred years ago. We lived in a colonial-era bungalow that I’d inherited from my grandfather, in Nungambakkam, considered an elite neighbourhood in the heart of the city. Greedy builders were eyeing it, saying I could get a hundred crores for the grounds. I was resolute in my refusal to sell it. For a start, what would I do with a hundred crores? My needs were simple. I had a roof over my head and more than enough money to see me through my days. And I don’t know if I can stomach seeing the old house torn down, the house where I’d spent every summer with my grandmother during the long hot months, travelling by the Grand Trunk express from Delhi to Madras that took almost two whole days. No, I didn’t want the structure to be brought down, and an ugly modern block of flats built in its place. The house stood, old and dignified, an affront to its flashier new-money neighbours.

As Vinod and I sipped our morning coffees, we surveyed the devastation before us — the huge lawn covered with green, brown and yellow leaves, decapitated marigolds and roses and flattened jasmine bushes, and  strewn here and there the flotsam and jetsam the storm had brought in its wake — bits of paper and cardboard, tattered pieces of cloth, and, surprisingly, a yellow plastic duck.

The duck sat upright in its ocean of leaves, watching the world with calm placidity. How had this toy come to be here? No young children lived in our bungalow, only me, my son Vinod, and my maid of many years Kanimozhi and her watchman husband, both of whom lived in the outhouse. Vinod refused to take up a nine-to-five job. Said he was working on a novel and needed the time and space to think. I didn’t mind. Rather, it came as a relief to me that he chose to be home. I’d lost touch with my husband ten years ago, when he’d upped and left to cultivate some farmland in the outskirts of Chennai, stating that he’d had enough of my bleakness and negativity. I was glad to see him go, the leech. Vinod’s presence was the aambalai thonnai, the male protection a woman is supposed to need.

This time of the morning was usually spent in sipping coffee. It was our time, Vinod and mine. I was about to say something about clearing the leaves when my maid, Kanimozhi, burst in.

“Paambe, paambe,” she cried. A snake was spotted rustling among the leaves, a gigantic cobra, its long black tongue darting in and out of its mouth, intent on its prey. “Amma, you have to get rid of it,” she cried, her body trembling. “He is one ferocious naag.”

Vinod took a last gulp and put down his coffee-cup. “I’ll get it,” he said. He went inside the house and emerged with a long pole tipped with a metal hook, the kind used for pulling down out-of-reach coconuts and mangoes.

My voice stuck in my gullet like an undigested morsel of food. I had to warn him. I cleared my throat and croaked out. “Vinod. Leave it. What are you doing? We’ll call the snake-catcher.”

He laughed. “And you think I have a snake-catcher’s number on speed dial? C’mon, Ma, this reptile is more frightened of us than we are of him.”

“Call—.” I stopped short. I was about to say call Murugan, Kanimozhi’s husband, and remembered that he’d left for his village a week ago and would return only later that night.

I followed Vinod into the garden. I could not, would not let him do this alone. He thrust the pole into piles of leaves, hoping to startle the reptile. “Don’t worry, ma, I’ll kill it,” he said.

My shoulders tightened, and my body went cold. “Whatever you do, Vinod, don’t kill it.”

“Ma, all it’ll take is one whack with this steel. It can’t be so big. I’ll get it.”

 “No, Vinod, whatever you do, don’t kill it,” I repeated.

But he wasn’t listening. He’d moved further up the garden, towards the mango tree, his pole prodding and sweeping the lawn.

I clutched at the amulet hanging between my breasts. My protection.

*

I was fifteen. Roaming around with my ‘gang’ as we called ourselves, in the shady by-lanes of Tilak Marg in Delhi. We were the children of bureaucrats and full of arrogant shit. A group of three boys and three girls, we’d meet up every evening to play badminton, go for walks, sing the latest Beatles’ songs, or quiz each other on literature and philosophy. John Paul Sartre, the great Russian masters, the English classics. That’s what we read or pretended to read. We spoke in English, with an occasional smattering or a swear word in Hindi.

That’s when the little curled-up thing fell out of a tree right into our path.

“Snake! Snake!” yelled a girl. I forgot who it was.

Without batting an eyelid, I lifted my foot and brought it down on the tiny reptile. I wore Bata shoes, Mary Janes, the ones made for the long haul with thick rubber soles and a solid, square heel.

“Oh my god, you’ve killed it,” said the girl.

It lay, a mess of blood and mottled beige-brown skin, its head smashed, its back broken. For a second or two the tail thrashed, and then that too became still.

We heard a rustle from the tree above. I looked up to see snake-eyes staring at me with cold hatred.

“Run!” shouted out one of the boys. “Mama Snake’s after us.”

He must have spoken in jest. But we took to our heels, all six of us, screaming and running down the quiet, residential lanes, with an uncle or an aunty out in their balconies giving us disapproving looks.

When I reached home, I told my mother what had happened.

“You killed a baby snake,” she said, shock and horror in her words. I understood her immediately. I’d heard enough snake-lore, of cobras taking revenge even seven births later if you killed their partner. One story that stayed in my mind was that of King Parikshit, who’d thrown a dead snake around a meditating sage’s shoulders because he had not answered the king’s question. I’d laughed uproariously when my grandmother told me this story. To my ten-year-old mind, it was hilarious. But Paati had reprimanded me. She told me the rest of the story, of how the meditating sage’s son, after learning of the king’s action, had cursed him, saying that within seven days his death would be at the jaws of a serpent. On hearing this, King Parikshit, who’d been a good and just king, accepted his fate, but his ministers would have none of it. They built him a mansion on top of a tall tower that was unapproachable by any other creature. But fate works in strange ways. When the king cut open a fruit, a worm emerged. This worm was none other than the King of Snakes, Takshaka, and Parikshit met his end.

Even at that young age, I’d never believed in any of those stories. I considered them primitive old wives’ tales.

“Yes. So?” I said in retort. “It’s not that I did it on purpose. Mom, I don’t believe in that bunkum. That there’ll be a curse on me. I know all that bullshit people say about killing snakes and shit.”

I purposely used the slang I’d picked up from American comics and TV shows. I didn’t call my mother “amma’ but ‘mom.’  All of us, our generation, born a decade or two after independence, somehow had this feeling that being angrez or western made us appear more sophisticated and intelligent. There was none of that ‘be Indian, be desi’ slogan that we hear nowadays. But people of my mother’s generation were still set in the very fabric of Indianness. The maid had a separate cup and plate, eggs were not eaten on Tuesdays and Fridays, mushrooms were a no-no. Plus a hundred other rules and regulations that people of our generation pooh-poohed, poking holes in the logic just to annoy our elders.

`Mom just set her lips in a straight line and went about her work.

That night, I had a raging fever. And nightmares of serpents attacking me, their ugly, red-wet cushiony mouths wide open, their fangs dripping green blood. Like a technicolour LSD trip. Had that snake-mother put a curse on me? Or maybe all the stories I’d been hearing, maybe that Beatles song, Lucy something, had seeped into my sub-conscious?

The next morning, Mom came to my room and saw me thrashing about in bed, muttering some incoherent nonsense. She felt my hot forehead. She knew, without my telling her, of my nightmare.

I could see the accusation in her eyes. See, I told you.

Mom knew what to do. I needed the help of a baba. She discreetly asked around, and the meeting was arranged. My father, a sensible, no-nonsense man working for the central government, did not know about our visit to the tantrik in the outskirts of Delhi. When my mother told the baba of what I’d done, he shook his head. Such an egregious sin, killing a snake. Even if done unintentionally. He repeated the lore of the cobra, of what its partner would do if I killed one. I’d heard this countless times. They mated for life. They would cross the seven seas to exact revenge, if not in this birth, in a future birth, many hundreds, even thousands of years later. This was called naaga dosham, the vilest, most egregious sin on earth. My sin was worse. In one headless moment, I’d taken the life not of the partner but the child.

But there was a remedy. It involved a hefty sum. It would take the tantrik nine days of prayers and for these nine days, I had to feed two snakes with milk to atone for my sin. I shivered, despite my fever, bundled up as I was in a shawl in the month of August. Feed two snakes? I could barely look at a snake. But he gave my mother two copper snakes in a small copper bowl. I had to pour milk over them every morning after a bath and chant a mantra for nine days.

“But the girl has to go to school,” said my mother. “How will she do all this?” She must have been thinking of how my no-nonsense father would react to me doing some pooja when I never even went near the shrine. But even for that, the baba had a solution. “You, as the mother, can perform it for her. A mother’s prayers can counteract the evil effects of naag dosha. But you must return after nine days along with your daughter.”

My fever abated. Mom swore it was to do with the baba’s prayers. Dad said it was the antibiotics. We returned after nine days. That’s when I was given the amulet which I was to wear around my neck until the day I died.

*

I had all but forgotten about the amulet. But the curse hung over me like a hooded shadow. It now came back, my sin. I clutched my amulet, feeling its solid little curves. 

Hadn’t I already paid for my thoughtless act in this life itself, married as I was to a good-for-nothing, a man my parents had warned me against? I was stubborn as only the young could be. A couple of years into our marriage, and he’d shown his true colours. He couldn’t hold down a job. He borrowed shamelessly from me. My parents had both passed in a tragic car accident, leaving me this stately old house in Chennai where I now lived, and money in a trust fund. But I found myself with child. I still should have left him. But what would my child do without a father? Wouldn’t he ask about him when he was old enough to realise he was different from the other children? Wouldn’t that make him turn against me?  And I didn’t want to be called a divorcee, the worst thing a woman could be called in those days.

So, I stayed on, in that loveless, luckless union. Perhaps that mother-serpent had cursed me after all. I hadn’t told my husband about that incident. It was a coiled secret around my heart, surfacing only on rare Amavasya nights, not as a nightmare but as a dream within a dream, of a slither, of glittering eyes, of a mottle of brown and beige, vague flickering.

They say love can hurt, and I now know what that means. When Vinod took his first breath, a helpless little bundle covered in the afterbirth, his head elongated, his little limbs crooked and flailing, and let out a wail, his body turning pink, his limbs straightening out, his tiny hands closing in a fist, my heart expanded so much it was hard to contain. This was love. He was mine. I had made him in my womb, this miraculous little being. He was a part of me. Of my body and my soul. He was the only source of happiness in my cursed life.

But little did I know the time had come for the curse to strike.

A cold wave passed though me. I clutched my amulet again. It was silver, a coiled silver snake, with ruby eyes and a small black bead on its forehead. Not more than two centimetres, I wore it threaded through my mangal sutra that I hadn’t bothered to remove, barely visible among the various bits hanging from the gold chain — the coral, the conch, the Victorian gold coin my grandmother had given me on my wedding and the two square gold  biscuits, one with Shiva and the other with Parvati embossed on them, that had been tied around my neck during the wedding rituals. Shiva and Parvati – the eternal consorts. I smiled at the irony of it. But the snake amulet was a carefully guarded secret. My useless husband hadn’t noticed it in all the years of our marriage. And I’d never breathed a word to my son, of that transgression in my youth.

A rustling in one corner drew our attention.

“It’s there,” I whispered. I don’t know why I whispered. Snakes can’t hear. At least, that’s what we were told.

Vinod walked with bold steps towards a pile of leaves from where we’d heard the rustling.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t go near. What if–?”

 He plunged the metallic hook-end of the pole into the pile, hoping to disturb the snake from its hiding place. Again and again, he ran it through the leaves.

“Doesn’t appear to be here,” he said. “Must’ve gone elsewhere.”

Where else? It could be anywhere in this huge lawn. I didn’t want him walking around and foraging for the reptile. What if he stepped on it?

I took a few tentative steps towards him. “Let’s get back into the house. Once Murugan returns, I’ll ask him if he knows anyone who can come. He’s quite resourceful.”

Vinod ignored me. He was still intent on locating the reptile. The skies were turning gloomy, dark clouds piling up. The threat of rain.

And then I saw it.

The same naked hatred staring at me from the bare branches of the mango tree now stripped of leaves. The snake had coiled itself around one of the lower limbs. And it was looking straight at me.

It was the same snake. The mother.

Would the amulet protect me?

*

I did not feel fear when my eyes sighted the reptile. Just a sense of fatalism. I had to pay for the sin of my youth. It slowly uncoiled itself, slithering down the branch, never taking its eyes off me.

I was rooted to the spot, my body paralysed by the reptile’s hypnotic gaze. It took its position, rearing up slowly, its hood fanning out, its eyes unblinking, cold, never leaving me. I waited, waited for the dive and the sharpness of its fangs.

But — the snake wasn’t looking in my direction. Its eyes were focussed on something else, not me. I was not its target.

It was Vinod.

My child for its child.

“No,” I cried out. A stream of urine ran down my legs, wetting my nightie. ‘No, not him, not my son.”

But my voice came out in empty gasps.

The snake opened its mouth, and its evil black tongue darted in and out. Its fangs glistened with green poison, the very same nightmare from my childhood. Only it was going to take my son’s life, not mine. A hideous act of revenge.

Vinod was still raking the leaves, his head bent, a few feet away from the mango tree, unaware of what lay above him.

I reached out once more for the amulet. Perhaps that would save him. I felt around for the familiar shape, the two little ruby nubs and the little black bead on the head, representing the nagmani, the precious gem cobras carry in their forehead.

It was missing.

In one crazed motion, I yanked off the gold chain. It snapped, scraping my neck, giving me a nasty cut, but the various talismans threaded through it were intact. In desperation I searched. Every stupid piece was still hanging from the chain. The conch, the coin, the coral, the two Shiva-Parvati biscuits. But no silver amulet. No protection.

I looked up. The reptile ‘s eyes were focussed on Vinod. I waved, the broken chain in my hand, but I failed to catch its attention. Vinod was within striking distance. I moved right behind him, in the vain hope that it would miss its target and get me instead.

A glint of silver caught my eye just as the serpent readied for the dive. Was it—was it…?

I reached down to the broad back of the yellow duck. My hand clasped the small two-centimetre curved piece of silver. My protection. Our protection. How did it find its way onto the plastic duck’s back? And how did this lifeless duck swim through the leaves and arrive here? Within arm’s reach?

I did the only thing I could. I held up the talisman to my forehead, so it was visible to the reptile. A silver disc, my third eye.

The snake stood still, its huge hood still fanned out, its eyes cold and shimmery. It remained still for a few moments. Perhaps a few seconds, perhaps an eternity, the forked tongue disappearing inside the cavern. And from its eyes, tears fell. Snake tears, small hard gems of crystal, diamond-like drops streaming down.

Crystal drops of water fell from my eyes too. I knew. She was mourning, mourning for her young, the baby I had killed. I felt a mother’s pain, the pain of losing your child, a pain that never leaves.

I knew now, what I hadn’t known before. The extent of my sin.

We cried, the two of us.

“Got it,” yelled out my son. I saw a thin brown snake coiled round the pole. He took it and walked to the front gate, tossing it over. “That was tricky,” he said, coming back with a triumphant smile on his face. “Hard to find it. It’s gone now. I saw it disappearing down the gutter.  Happy, Ma? I didn’t kill it. Waddya say, Ma? I can become a snake-catcher. A good job, isn’t it? You can brag, my novelist snake-catcher son. It’ll look great on the back cover of my book, my author biography.”

He stopped when he saw me holding up the talisman, the other arm clutching my gold chain. “Ma, are you OK?” he asked. “What’s that thing you’re holding to your forehead?”

I looked at the mango tree. It was bare.

The curse had been lifted. I just knew. I’d felt the snake-mother’s anguish, had cried with her. She’d forgiven me.

Black clouds rolled in. Wind scattered the leaves. A few drops of rain hit the ground.

“Let’s go in,” I said. “Seems like another shower.”

The trees shook and the leaves swirled. The plastic duck rose, a splash of yellow amidst a flurry of greens and browns, disappearing over the low parapet wall into the grey skies.

Padmini Sankar has published two novels, The Mother of all Parties ( women’s fiction, Black Ink, 2020) and Zara and the Bumbling Genie (middle-grade fantasy, Om Books International, 2025). Her short stories have appeared in the Crime Writers Association’s Arabian Noir anthology and the Historical Writers Association’s Dorothy Dunnett Short Story anthology as well as online in Out of Print and A Tale of Four Cities. 

We thought in moments,
gilded capture of spike and
trough, naked as insides.

See what cross-sections make:
blocks of past, a little bounce
and give, like tofu or halloumi.

A god man asks for labels,
his partners do too; here’s a
daughter that never knew.

Obituary tired, she signs off
on moments, the necessary
capture of spike and trough,

greater arc and chancel arch,
two anecdotes and a generic
set of dates for the ceremony.

His was an era. He was a time.
Whatever way you slice it.

Ewen Glass (he/him) is a screenwriter and poet from Northern Ireland who lives with two dogs, a tortoise and a body of self-doubt; his poetry has appeared in the likes of Okay Donkey, Maudlin House, HAD, Poetry Scotland and One Art Poetry. Bluesky/X/IG: @ewenglass