Of Foliage by Mandira Pattnaik
Gulmohar, and the Girl
Last Summer, the shadow of the Gulmohar was a spiny starved girl you used to know. She ate little, like ants, and hoarded hopes in unlit caverns stacked with magazines that told the world how girls your age should look. If friends told you to forget that the starved girl was once a mound, you knew they were reminding you of you, the girl you were trying to forget. Reminding you, how he would never turn to look at someone who wore ill-fitting jumpers. But you yearned him still, as if the doormat yearns the dust, and that’s why you were as wispy as the breeze now, pale as the sky.
This Summer, you’ve abandoned it all. You’ve climbed the tree. Perched yourself close to the branch to let the shadow know you are your former self, no longer trying to fit in with the notion of others, and the shadow shows up, full and round, a presence that warms, like April and May, girl-names you’d always loved, like June when the world smells like roses, air and land so abundant, you feel like Summer itself, and the Gulmohar tells you in whispers how it’s hug is the hottest.
A Palm in a Storm
You’re the memoirist who carves rings on her body, tattoos her pains in mysterious geometric shapes and embeds within her, counts her nineteen summers by the edge of time and space. The only bone in your body is a solitary shoot, still unhurt, that rises to the infinite, bows to the wind on a deserted beach. Today will be the tenth anniversary of when he wanted to cut you right at our middle, the excuse of a storm. But you still have a defiant crown of green.
The waves watching you will prod you to come down. There'll be no answer, only the cry of a mourning soul as the bird on your feathered fan-shaped leaf sings of the moment that careened and crisscrossed your life. You'll never ask your fault; none will ever know why.
At dusk, you'll find the golden sands whirling around your girth, letting another day slip between their fists, the sea breaking itself on the shore.
You’ll be grateful you're always somewhere near something that’s fleeting and changing.
Summer Grass
In a lush green forest, you are a blade of grass, three months away from sixteen. When the blast of a new music band, the guitarist from Calcutta, threatens to deafen you because it's been on through the best of the night, and if you whine, your little lie will be as plain as the dawn, your friend pulls you out before he thinks you might puke, but you're the wet grass, easily trampled, so you let him lead you.
On the sidewalk, where you sit, the wind is sharp, like slicing the year away making way for the new. You feel the rush within, when his hand presses on your thigh, a little too high. Everything else is a blur, like a blade of grass seeing through the fog.
Years later, when you shovel the scars under a carpet of grass, you remember how you were told that you were shy, and so you covered yourself more and more, hid your skin under moss. You drank the rain, licked the snow, and on a morning that was immersed in grey, you married that fog in a mindless hour.
You no longer mind his mowing, for, at twenty-three, you know the grass doesn't die, grows greener from its pains.
Artist’s Statement
Defiance and free-spirited are moods that I frequently explore in my writing, drawing inspiration from daily life, urban cultures and working-class routines. Making fictional characters of people I happen to meet in public places is also something that, sometimes, works. The flash here is an amalgamation of these themes.
Mandira Pattnaik's work has appeared in The McNeese Review, Penn Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, Bacopa Literary, Flash International Short-short Magazine, Timber Journal, DASH Journal, LampLight Magazine, Atlas & Alice, Citron Review, Watershed Review, and Passages North among other places. Her stories have appeared in anthologies and been translated. She received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfictions in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Mandira's work was longlisted in Wigleaf Top50 (2022), Highly Commended at the CRAFT Flash Contest 2020 and LITRO Magazine Summer Flash Contest 2021. She serves as the Editor and Columnist, trampset, and Contributing Editor, Vestal Review. More at mandirapattnaik.com