Cairn
by ANURADHA PRASAD
Christine Shan Shan Hou, Old Hurts, collage on paper, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
CAIRN
ANURADHA PRASAD | JUNE 2023 | Issue 24
Myra believed in mornings. They showed up. This morning showed up with a boulder. It pinned her down. She clutched her key charm, a talisman of jagged edges rescued from her mother’s antique store, in panic.
It had been an unusual day at school those many years ago. As her teacher praised her, she felt like an outline that was being filled with color. From a chameleon-like creature to a bird of paradise—it was a transition. At dinner, she wanted to tell her mother how well she did in class. Nervous, she stabbed the vegetables on her plate. Mauna, who had been moving like a tightly coiled serpent, uncoiled, grabbed the fork out of her hand, and holding it over her like a trident, asked, you want me to feed you now, is it?
Myra’s puffed plumage considerably lost its verve. Ashok came in. He could barely balance. He failed miserably in his attempts to cover his drunkenness. Mauna banged a pot of stew in front of them. It splashed. Myra half-expected the beans to flop around like gasping fish. Tense silence wound around them. She weighed her words, threw them into the center of the table, and saw comic book flashes of BOOM and POW as they disintegrated mid-air. In the end, she swallowed her newfound colors down with the beans and carrots. All were equally indigestible. She became an outline again, an outline that casually stole the key to her mother’s newly acquired chest.
At work, a meeting was underway and she slid into her chair. As the meeting moved unhurried toward lunch, the pressure of the boulder, which now sat resolutely on her head, grew. It pressed into her skull shooting hot, gritty lines into her face.
She turned her glazed eyes on the strange dream she had woken from. She was wearing a blue-and-white gown, striped ghost of mad hair, walking down an endless corridor tiled in blue and white and a line of rooms with doors closed and open. On the other side, stinking toilets overflowing with urine, yellow, wheat, gold, all gagging. Her belly grew bigger and bigger. She would explode. Crouching, she lifted the gown up. A small, wet baby fell into the clogged toilet and drowned. No, no, no, her voice hadn’t screamed.
She tried to join the dots between the boulder and the belly, the boulder and the baby.
They wouldn’t join.
As the meeting broke up, Myra rose unsteadily, precariously balancing the roused boulder as she walked to the lunch room. Her colleagues were huddled over a picture of a dog. She let out a measured exhale. She said, I had a dog once. She knew enough to stop there as she felt the energy of connection wash over her. She basked in it like it was the summer sun. They talked and she listened, an occasional nod and a shake of her head. In between these, she wanted to tell them yes, she had a dog once, a puppy on the verge of adulthood.
I had a dog once whom my father killed. He drove over him. My father drove over my dog when he was drunk and as my dog had dashed to greet him. He was excited and eager to see my father in a way that Mauna and I no longer felt, hadn’t felt in a long time. My heart stopped. My legs turned to jelly. My dog let out a yelp, a squeak. He squeaked and squeaked before he whimpered and whimpered before he gasped and gasped before he let out one last breath of jagged edges like my key. His name was Boo. I sat with him. It lasted a few minutes and once he lay quiet, I stared hard at the frozen pair of shoes in front of him. Dark brown loafers, shiny and vain. The perfect crease of trousers but I did not follow it to look up at my father. I could still smell him, yes. Mauna, for once, fell silent as she walked back with a shawl to wrap Boo in. We went quietly, she in the driver’s seat, me at the back, Boo nestled in a wicker basket.
We all knew not to meet each other’s eyes. My eyes went only as far as Mauna’s hands on the steering wheel
and the gear shift and no further.
Myra was not sure if she looked Ashok fully in the face ever again. Did his disgrace finally hit him as he stood there next to the lifeless body? Of all the ways in which he had betrayed her, this was the cruelest. This was the moment pain dived inside her belly and surged as rage.
Of course, Myra never actually shared all of this. It would make the bonhomie, the normalcy flee, tail tucked between its tense legs. She wrote instead, forcing words to step out of the dark closets of the mind. When they emerged, the words felt strange, distant, and weak. At times, they were the wild lines of a child. The pen slashed the paper raising welts on it. Rage cannot be confined to form. Grief cannot be subdued. Terror cannot be leashed. The shape of her pain, the space of her pain, was a universe. Her form, its sole container.
The boulder lightened into an airball as she got around to her work. When she left the office, the boulder faithfully returned and it wanted to roll down and ride on her back. Still, she took the long way home.
Ashok was a small-town man. His mother was stung by a scorpion when she was pregnant with him. The pain hardened her and turned her into stone. And then he was born. He had three brothers, a sister alive, and a sister dead. She died as a baby but the family invoked her again and again in living memory. They refused to put her down, refused to lay her to rest. She was still a baby, sister long dead, when they were old men and an old woman. They rocked her, crooned to her, told about her, grieved for her. She, who never knew them, stayed silent and did not kick her legs or blubber or drool. It was the sister alive who stepped in when their father beat him. It was the brothers who sneered. Ashok stopped looking at the eyes of men.
Yes, Myra was not ready to go home. She stopped for a glass of juice. Three blenders whirred fruit to pulp to froth, the sweet lime more resistant than the watermelon, its skin and seed snagging on the blades.
A man staggered to the counter. Behind the glass were stacked pyramids of pineapples, apples, and sweet limes. All eyes watched him. Worn clothes, caked dirt under his nails, unwashed hair. The man behind the counter said, not the kind of juice you are looking for. The drunkard grinned. A woman scrunched her face in disgust. The man shooed the drunkard, go, go on. A street dog looked up with indifference. The houseflies continued to circle the blenders and the trash cans.
The drunkard, still grinning, staggered away. The shame he did not feel, Myra did. Shame was an old acquaintance whom she encountered often like a witch would a familiar. She knew its shape well: crumpled, creased, and cowering. She did not know where she knew it from, where they first met. Like a shadow, it seemed to be there always. Surging in her body, another layer of being, silent in the many folds of her, rising up as it did now.
She pedaled furiously. The scenery of empty land, wild with bushes and grass, fled past. Her eyes caught only blurred greens and the newly blossomed pinks of the tabebuia against a sky strung with sooty clouds. The wheels churned, turning over and over themselves, restricted and contained in a frame, the spokes a moving blur, the steel glinting when the headlights of other vehicles caught it,
the rubber confident.
Mauna had told her once about her father’s first drink. He was twenty-eight. They were at a house party with friends. After a single glass of whiskey, Ashok had run to the bathroom to throw up, Mauna rubbing his back, cleaning his vomit, the edges of her favorite chiffon wet and heavy with the smell of puke.
Mauna mourned its loss.
He's dead, Mauna had said, the night before, after a perfunctory greeting, getting straight to the heart of the matter. Something skittish knotted itself in Myra’s throat, grew to the size of a fist. Words couldn’t swim past it. A hard edge crept into Mauna’s voice. A blob of white noise was followed by a curt click. Myra wanted to feel something. But she didn’t.
The tire hit a rock on its path and skidded, the bicycle fell to the pavement, she on the street. A car screeched to a halt inches from her.
It was only as she hobbled up the stairs to her apartment that she instinctively reached for her neck for the key and found only bare skin and bone. She felt truly lost. She had lost the one thing that gave her the way out. The key that had begun as a simple act of petty theft had acquired many new meanings. Now she felt exposed and unmoored. More painful than her scraped limbs and bloody knee was the slow swelling waves of despair that gained on her till breathing became shallow and short and she curled up on the sofa, a fetus out of womb.
The boulder sat on her stomach, a mourning thing of big eyes. Giant steam motes of red
danced in her head and dispersed into tiny red stars.
Anuradha Prasad is a writer living in Bangalore, India. She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature. She writes short fiction, essays, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Sleet Magazine, Literally Stories, The Bangalore Review, Borderless Journal, Muse India, and Usawa Literary Review.
Christine Shan Shan Hou is a poet and artist of Hakka Chinese descent. Their publications include The Joy and Terror are Both in the Swallowing (After Hours Editions 2021), Community Garden for Lonely Girls (Gramma Poetry 2017), and “I'm Sunlight” (The Song Cave 2016). Their artwork has been exhibited at White Columns and Deli Gallery in New York City.