Reasons for returning
His sadness had visited her in the night, she knew when she awoke. Such weight. Raindrops ran a few inches horizontally along the branch of the clove tree before they dangled shivering in the monsoon wind and fell down. At her desk, she counted the drops, each one feeling real to her as blood, each wet leaf etched green in her mind. She walked barefoot over clay tiles, her feet light without boots.
Photo by Sithumini Ratnamalala
Twice she turned her head upon the staircase, thinking she heard his tread. When the white pigeons took off from her neighbour’s roof, she wanted him to watch their beauty. She wanted him to see the blueness of this sky.
But he wasn’t there.
At night, the ancient wood carvings over the doors made patterns upon her heart as she paused in the dark before a lit room. The moon shone in through the window, fell upon the half-empty mattress and against her skin. She curled her fingers upon the light. Hers.
The phone rang. “Come back,” he told her.
“This is home,” she said.
“Without me?”I am going to the center of the world, she had thought, when she left home to start her degree. That is what everyone said. She was young and open as a fresh wound.
New York.
Manhattan.
From a little island just below the tropics, almost not visible in maps, beyond the radar of most New Yorkers who thought the sun rose in East Manhattan and fell in West. She went looking for the center. Perhaps Times Square, which is what they showed most when they showed New York on TV. Perhaps that triangle in the middle of the street, surrounded by light.
But it was just a place from which one could watch endless streams of yellow cabs, double-decker busses, skyscrapers with advertisements drawn on them so that women’s thighs were two stories high. It was the running up of a massive electricity bill. It was people rolling forward in waves, tourists looking for the center of the earth.
She spread her arms wide and turned her face towards the sky. The Center of the Earth, she said. But when she opened her eyes, it was still yellow cabs snaking past her in a coat that smelled of fenugreek. It was lines of people waiting for cheap Broadway tickets, it was black men asking her to see New York for fifty dollars in a bus that would have its hood down.
You are young, you will grow to like this, he said. She was a new graduate. A head shorter than him, a generation younger, a whole spectrum of colour darker. She had a scarf around her neck, he was twining an edge around his fingers.
That is why I have to return now.
Next to her house, a poor carpenter was building his home upwards. Very slowly. Yet it impressed her more than the Empire State Building which shone in cheap gold inside and offered a shockingly boring view of endless rooftops at its highest summit.
“Why?” he asked her. His voice sounded very far away. It sounded lost. Should she say about the raindrops, the leaves of clove, the wood carvings and the clay?
If she had been otherwise.
Mirror LIT
From today, the Mirror Magazine starts a bi weekly page for literature, that will feature a new series of Flash Fiction the second Sunday of the month and the long running 100 Word Page on the last. We hope to award the ‘Mirror Lit’ prize at the end of one year, for the best Flash Fiction entry.
The Mirror Lit Prize, by its name, encapsulates what we are looking for in literature: a reflection of life as in a mirror, but also a mirror that is lit up, so that the relection can be more luminous, surreal, magical, as fantastic as the writer wishes it to be.
Flash Fiction – also called by many other names like short shorts and postcard fiction – is one of the shortest genres of fiction, therefore eminently suitable for a newspaper.
One definition of flash fiction hasn’t yet been agreed upon, but it is generally taken to be a very short form of the short story, from about 300 to a 1000 words, with the same elements of the short story: with a definite plot – so has a beginning, a conflict that comes in the middle and a resolution at the end. It can also have characters, dialogue, setting and theme, just like in a more traditional short story, implied, even if they are not stated.
However, unlike in the short story, Flash Fiction writers have to concentrate more on word economy and minimalism. They have to get in as much power as they can into a few words. And therefore, their great impact, if written well.
Flash fiction to the ‘Mirror Lit’ page should be restricted to 800 words. (Please send in your word count.) We start publishing chosen works from the second week of November so please send in your entries by the end of October to
Madhubhashini Disanayaka Ratnayake
The Mirror Lit Page
Sunday Times
No. 8 Hunupitiya Cross Road
Colombo 2.
N.B. Work sent to this page may be edited. There are many great Flash Fiction websites online for you to check out this genre. To read is the best way to learn how to write well. For this issue we publish below a short short story titled – ‘Reasons for Returning’
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