Mandira Pattnaik

Short Fiction

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Indeed, breeze claps in claggy chambers — if fate is foretold, will she escape? 

Indeed, bees frenzied in tiny honeycombs, following love-less soars to blooms, as ordered and structured. Like in prisons. Mighty iron bars cemented with laws. Except it confines her lover.

Indeed love, erratic. She commits to its obverse — discipline. Nurtures the marigold, feeds the pigeons, goes to pee, and back to caressing her five-months belly. She can. Except he, her lover, can’t.“Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort!” She carefully reads the inscription on the neighbor’s housefront, walls plastered across Paris.

Indeed one weak-timed departure from order. Behind the spine of a botched, failing marriage. Her husband, uncaring. Loveless union. Restricted in numerous ways, she was defiant. Like sound, confined to scales, ferments to music. She turns, hums: “Ca ira” ! Exactly as she heard Ladré, the former soldier, sing on the streets. Taps her feet. Pauses. Imagines a crowd storming Bastille. His clanking chains. Her lover in mortal pain. Rues the casual fling, three torrid months, that got her pregnant.

Like garbled omissions, she stops to peer out the window. There goes a friend, a curious child in her arms. Your door’s ajar. Lightning at her feet, she answers — Is it? Oh! Is it? Can she escape? Now? Orfèvre husband, humiliated at her deep betrayal, locks her every day when he goes to work, but god, even forts have lunettes. 

Like unbound, she waddles to the front door. Stares — like hermit in a narrow room. Sometimes a step is a leap. Except, habituated to conformity, she turns. House of routine, walls of enormous blankness. Even the wind chimes numb. 

Like briefly conscious of the chaos within, and outside, she stirs. Except, there are little pockets of too much turbulence. Door-frames flapping on hinges, clamouring, fluttering like wings, taking flight. 

Like benevolent nostalgia, this moment is blurred. Except it’s an almost placid, semi-frozen lake — there will be ripples underneath, every now and then, and reordering of what remains.

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Mandira Pattnaik is an Indian fiction writer, poet, editor, and columnist. She is the author of five chapbooks. Mandira is the Contributing Editor of Vestal Review. Author website and other social media links: mandirapattnaik.com and on Twitter: @MandiraPattnaik Instagram: @pattnaik_mandira

Photo Credit:  Jake Mullins on Unsplash