Tumours on my Chest Tear drops, popcorn, kidney peas, red ants collectively navigating through a complex quarry, a fable of sequins, or say like the child with knotted limbs who couldn’t make it till dawn break. Is it vitriolic? Not like the toothache that barges in when we are mid-flight into our dirty deeds, but like the cramps on arcane purple mornings when you are buried in deep sleep. Will they appear again? You mean like the hairs on my bald terrain? Theory says yes like uneasy questions searching for meaning I hope this time they are photogenic. Robot Mom No girly time but a relic of disenfranchised relationship. She weaves the worn-out pillowcase with my butchered dreams, ignites the chipped tile fireplace with paper-cuts from my Origamis she wouldn’t let my art to exist like my ballerinas grimed in dust. I had mistaken a manipulated voice for my mom. Series of unarmoured bickering unnecessary work of everyday parenting circling like conjured apparition with a body reeking of ambition never appreciating my indecipherable paintings despite gazing at it thrice. When she held the arrant cat in her arms it wasn’t about love, ‘die’ a generous word she would confer misreading the product of my obduracy and during the times I whispered about my female lover. I wonder if I am even alive. The Last Girl I dated I was never interrogated! no, not once in the span of thirteen months we had dated, I would gulp martini and blush insane while she taught me female anatomy without any coyness she would boast about the stacks of cotton she took away home in paper bags smelling of moth-repellent in the nocturnal hours. with burning passion she talked of her conceited stance with her props: gloves, masks and scissors, the cluster of tumours she has massacred, like I made Origamis from paper-cut obituaries. cynically she would guffaw in morgues, read near-death-experiences as bedtime glory kept a monkey’s paw as talisman and a leather-strapped diary smeared with ideograms. Once she boomeranged in jubilation while reading the abridged version of Cornelius, but chocked her angsty patient with asphalt. When she cursed a dog with abomination it could never bat an eyelash, I dreaded to tell her about my belly pain and the vitriolic leech gnawing my brain. I left her without any expletives because I couldn’t register her metaphysics, until I received a libation. At the restaurant surrounded by Mannequins Group of three girls absorbed in a risqué chat delectably ogling at the single guy with a stern backbone never ruffling dining next to their table. They mutely played mimicries their lips intact with the ochre from Greece. An old interracial couple about to make a confession, on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary. one couldn’t lift the cup of vinegar, the other dozed off unwary of any immanence. Two bards dressed in overcoat men without a temperament, gesticulated about the books unread and about their prodigal habits that supplanted their wives with mistresses. The landscape also had a muse, a Victoria’s Secret model waxy thighs and tresses opalescent a face of stubborn tendency she could make one candidly smitten but no one cared to shrug away a glance. I could sip my juice, Spit and Rip out a tooth and pay the waiter with dismembered mannequins but I waited for them to express a gamut of human emotions. Death Certificate Welcome to Death View Clinic Read the cardboard sign A red-faced man reeking of gin Was consigned with the anteriority. ‘I need a death certificate for my wife’ Explained the pensioner A loner at his retirement home As lean as a popsicle stick. ‘You have to wait till sunset glow’ The red-faced man cared to speak. Few hours of weary pain In dull remembrance of days erstwhile He surveyed the worn-out lawn And the epitaphs immured With wild mushrooms. She was a lipstick-lesbian, Had a girlfriend Who didn’t even attend her funeral And he a gay With his share of dirty deeds. Their marriage was one of convenience Was the wait worthwhile? Eyes full of sleep and lost lustre He clomped down to the cafeteria A daydreamer still, at eighty ‘You should get another one Without waiting for a special occasion’ An illogical chunk of his brain murmured For nobody will be there to fetch his.
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Anindita Sarkar is pursuing Mphil degree in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University. She is from Kolkata, India. She is also an UGC Junior Research Fellow.
This is her first feature on The Fictional Café.
