Ramsha Siddiqui

Razia had crept into her husband’s private room while he was away. The room had a single shelf lining the wall; otherwise, it was a grey drab room. Underneath the charpai ^[1] were sacks made out of bedsheets, stuffed and top-knotted as if ready to be carried away balanced on a head. She touched the bottles on the shelf, smelling the ingredients, unscrewing lids and rubbing the powder between her fingers. They were usually in an indistinguishable state, all pastes and powders of herbs and roots tightly secured in stoppers. There was also a lockable register where he wrote down his homeopathic remedies and beside it a small metal canister where he kept his degree from Aligarh University; he had wanted to sell it, but she told him it was his only worthy possession. In return he told her that she was very plain apart from her perfectly shaped ears.

Razia walked into the room, she walked over to the charpai. There was a starch white salwar ^[2] laid out, fresh, ready to be worn. She touched the fabric; it was stiff and needed a little sweat to soften it, she thought. As if the strange thought had overcome her, she slid off her salwar in a swift motion, almost lost her balance, and steadied herself on the edge of the charpai. She then drew up the brand-new salwar, swept her long shirt to the side and clutched it on her hip while she worked at the drawstring. As she tied the second knot, a strange thought occurred to her, one of those things no one would really dwell on but it might have just been a qabooliat ki ghari ^[3], so that before she was finished knotting, Razia disappeared into starched white trousers.

Razia, who was now no longer Razia, or a different kind of Razia, was nowhere to be found when her husband arrived. He was twice her age, and the first time she saw him he had reminded her of a shrivelled-up frog in the June sun: tough and brown and shrunken to the bone. That morning he lay in bed soundlessly curled to his side, while she lay as far away from him as she could, then, turning to face him, she inched closer and studied him. She looked at his furrowed brow and wisps of an unremarkable grey beard and felt a hardening resentment. It was the kind of solid stuff that built in her, but she could not explain it without sounding thankless. So she reminded herself about how he always bought things in twos so there would always be a spare ceiling fan or pair of slippers, but it was his incessant nagging that had become unbearable; taunting seemed to run in his family like a disease. Women’s minds, he said, run at zero meter, just look at my wife, she can’t even make my breakfast the way I like it. The brother’s wife was pleased with this and heaped more food into his plate. One day at breakfast he was complaining about the state of his eggs, cold and unsalted, yet proceeded to chew loudly, smacking his lips with every sip of tea. She picked up her knife and stabbed the toast on her plate but kept looking down. He had begun to irritate her enormously, especially in the bedroom when he touched her clumsily while she cringed at his trembling hands, creased and thick like paws; he wore a look on his face as if he was about to cry or sneeze but couldn’t find relief.

When Razia’s husband came home, he called out for her, but there was no answer. She had been quiet and ponderous over the last few days, and her quietness unnerved him. He peered into the kitchen but there was no food prepared, yet a strange odour permeated the house. Recognizing the acrid, ripe smells of his tonics and bottles, he quickly marched into his private room. He was infuriated, discovering his things out of order — opened and spread and smelling everywhere, he thought, I don’t want to have to slap her again, but a young dumb girl needs some sense. When he squatted down to start clearing his things, his eye caught, on the charpai, a white starched salwar — that was reassuring. He thought she had laid it out for him, maybe she had bought it for him, made it for him, and maybe she was finally getting over the whole incident.

He slid off his blue salwar and eagerly grabbed onto the bleach white. He slipped in one scrawny leg and then another; he hiked it up to his waist. He lifted up his shirt, clenching it under his chin, and strained to see the work his hands were doing below his grey-haired belly. He noticed the drawstring was too long but double-knotted it and stuffed it inside, letting it hang against his skinny thigh. Allowing the shirtfront to drop, he then changed into one of his ten identical white kurtas. Strutting around feeling ship-shape, he heard the booming call for namaz and left for the neighbourhood mosque. He started feeling an itch in his legs, but he’d be late for the congregational prayer, so he ignored it.

Inside the mosque he settled his damp feet on the straw mat spread across the marble floor.

“Allahuakbar.”

Razia, who had stitched herself anew into starch white, slowly began her tightening and tautening; she began shrinking around his scrawny hairless legs. The white shrunk up so that his ankles started to become visible. He felt this strange occurrence taking place and thought she hadn’t soaked the unstitched garment to let it shrink, and now it was shrinking on his body, from his own sweat. Except the prayer room was cool enough, and he wasn’t even sweating. It was breaking his concentration, and with his hands across his belly he stole a quick glance downwards — the devil’s imagination has gotten into me, I must concentrate.

“Allahuakbar.”

He quickly bent down to catch up with the rest of the congregation. Razia was enjoying herself now. She chafed the dangling sack of his balls and started to choke his flaccid penis so that he gave out a sudden yelp. The whole thing looked like a tuskless elephant, currently endangered. As he bent with his hands on his knees, he itched and scratched there, digging his trimmed nails as far as he could. While fifty or so foreheads greeted the mat in prostration, he quickly rubbed and scratched where Razia tightened the most. The elephant had started to sweat, and if it could have, it would have delivered an ear-splitting trumpet that would cause the congregation to scatter barefoot. He was terribly anxious now, and his eyes were watering from the pain — he broke his prayer; he would offer his penance-prayers, but he just had to get the damn thing off — so she hadn’t forgiven him after all, and there was some black magic in this; he was sure of it. At the doorstep of the prayer room there was a muddle of slippers and sandals, but he didn’t care right now to find the shoe that fit. He slipped out into the street, panting and jogging while someone called out to him, but he ignored the concerned voice.

There was a movement around his waist; the drawstring unknotted, snaked its way across his tufted belly, and wrapped around him tightly as he shrieked. The garment had now shrivelled itself right down to his lower half, paralyzing any further struggle. It was clear to him he could no longer move, although he was close enough to his house down the narrow, pitted street. Neighbours had started gathering around his fallen figure. His legs would soon start to swell and he trembled — his body half curled and half stiff, had started to fall numb before he was laid onto a stretcher and driven away.

Razia was left in the stiff white of the garment that had to be cut and peeled, shred and scissored till every little bit was finally torn away. She felt she had astonished her husband to his rightful decline, and that now she could rest happily in her tatters.

RAMSHA SIDDIQUI is currently doing her BA in liberal arts from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan. She enjoys writing surrealist poetry and dabbles in short story writing to survive against depression. She also enjoys traditional forms of Islamic art, Qawwali, Punjabi poetry and is fond of surrealist artworks and fiction.

 
[1] a traditional woven bed used in the Indian subcontinent.

[2] a pair of light, loose, pleated trousers tapering to a tight fit around the ankles, worn by women from South Asia, typically with a kameez.

[3] any time when prayers are answered

Brian Lillie

1ST DEGREE

Jefferson Davis purchased a sock boiler from Stanislav Gamoria, the crazed Prussian inventor who was holed up in Philadelphia for several years in the mid-nineteenth century, waiting for that whole “Gamoria Poisoned Our Water Supply” thing to blow over.

One of the socks that were boiled was a green woolen number that Davis purchased during an absinthe-fueled debauch in New Orleans a few years before the War Between the States started to screw with his nightlife. This sock later fell out of a steamer trunk as it was being transported to Charleston, along with Davis’ entire collection of big-eyed silver duckling statuettes. The sock lay in a ditch for several weeks before being eaten by a particularly hungry badger.

2ND DEGREE

The badger’s named was “Lil’ Bumpy”, on account of the fact that he was smaller than the other badgers and had a fairly advanced case of eczema. (This didn’t prevent him from being a favorite among the toddler badgers, who would gather around him at the holidays and listen to him tell stories about rutting, looking for food, avoiding raccoons, etc.)

Now, after Bumpy ate the boiled green sock, a strange thing happened: You see, when that sock was originally dyed, a single snapweed seed got lodged in between some of its fibers. The act of boiling that sock several times cooked the seed, eventually releasing a tiny amount of Protease 15, which has been known to decrease the severity of skin ailments in small mammals. Unfortunately for Bumpy, he would have needed to be soaked in eighty-five gallons of Protease 15 for five weeks to fully cure his eczema. As it was, the tiny amount he ingested was just enough to kill one of his million or so eczema bumps.

That bump was named Gary.

3RD DEGREE

Gary’s death sent a shockwave throughout the Lil’ Bumpy Eczema community, as he was the Ombudsman for the right front paw, as well as secretary of the local Lodge. You can probably imagine that his funeral and wake were quite large and well-attended affairs, not to mention rather raucous. Over the course of the evening, all of the eczema bumps in attendance drank WAY too much and ate all sorts of fatty finger foods, which Gary’s lodge brethren had brought in abundance. The smell of all these microscopic cocktail wieners and bacon-stuffed cheese modules gathered together in one small area of Lil’ Bumpy’s right front paw was enough to attract an elderly mosquito named Ms. Eliza Portmanteau.

Because Ms. Portmanteau’s vision had deteriorated with the onset of old age (she was, after all, over thirty-five days old at this point!) she could not make out the tiny drunken mourners in their tiny little blobbish black suits, eating their tiny little snacks. All she saw was a vaguely ovoid patch of undulation that smelled like bacon. Thus, it is completely understandable that she thought she was beholding the ancient Mosquitoan god called Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee, the Bacon-Scented Oracle of Punkratonia.

As she prostrated before the “Oracle”, the drunken eczema bumps all looked up and were horrified to see the gigantic, matronly insect crouching above them. All except Pepito, Gary’s brother-in-law. He was so drunk that he thought the monstrous creature was really funny, and so he shouted at the top of his lungs, “Hey big mama, why don’t you come over to my place for a drink!”

Through her aged ears, Ms. Portmanteau heard Pepito’s jape as “From now on, you must subsist only on flower juice!” Ms. Portmanteau went on to form a Mosquito religion called “The Juicers,” who strove to give up their bloodsucking ways and live only on the nectar of fragrant woodland flowers. This religion lasted roughly three days, by the end of which all of its converts had died from malnutrition.

4TH DEGREE

Twenty-nine years later, in the library of Ohio State University in Columbus, a studious thespian by the name of Kroll Vandenbeen was researching obscure Mosquito lore for his role as the eldest larvae, Flip, in Arturo Sandregar’s “Death of 215,000 Mosquito Larvae,” when he stumbled across a terse passage in Wooton’s History of Really Stupid Insect Religions which mentioned Eliza Portmanteau and her ill-starred Juicers. Included was an artist’s rendering of Ms. Portmanteau prostrating to an oddly shaped god, which glowed godishly from the paw of a badger. “Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee, the Bacon-Scented Oracle of Punkratonia,” read the caption. Aha! This was just the stage moniker Vandenbeen had been searching in vain for. He had already picked out “Kevin” as the new first name that would catapult him to stardom, but now he had an equally impressive surname!

Behold! Kevin Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

Anyone who knows even a little about Hollywood would be able to tell you that Vandenbeen nee Kevin Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee went on to become one of the world’s biggest stars, winning three Best Actor Oscars, and starring in over forty well-regarded hit films, including “Wax Them Horsies,” “From This One Place To This Other Place With Bigger Trees,” and “Akimbo!”

5TH DEGREE

On His deathbed, Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee managed to write an autobiography before succumbing to elbow cancer. The book, One Cool Guy, became an instant bestseller, translated into twenty-five languages, including Chizembop, Eskimo, and Flozberish.

One dark and stormy night, a heavily loaded cargo plane sped above the mountains of Flozber towards the capitol city, Mulzmoondt. Its hold was filled with copies of Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee’s autobiography, freshly translated and printed using burnished spinach squeezins, in the traditional Flozberian way. All of a sudden, a finger of treacherous lightning jabbed downwards from the darkened clouds like a second-grade teacher accusing a seven-year-old of stealing her Hello Kitty “Best Teacher in the World” nose hair clippers, striking the plane and effectively busting it in two. Books and molten fuselage screamed away in great billowing wads to crash into the lonely mountains below.

One book, though, remained aloft in a particularly playful current of air, which blew the lucky tome all the way to Greenland before depositing it, unharmed, in the laundry basket of Kjerklt Ntttkrrsko’trsk, a local sportswriter, who was busy working on an article about that afternoon’s National Sodball Championship match between the Grrkkt’l Sassownsk’tts and the Ornjsk Bierntt’llqt’s.

6TH DEGREE

That afternoon, Ntttkrrsko’trsk slipped on a rogue Mento and broke his leg, while rushing to turn in his story. At the hospital, his niece Tjyerka’ssk visited, and he asked if she would go to his apartment and hang his laundry out to dry, which he had planned to do himself but would now be unable.

Tjyerka’ssk agreed, and when she went to her uncle’s apartment, she discovered Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee’s autobiography sitting atop the mildly damp laundry. The combination of the colors of the book jacket, the smell of the laundry, and the cavorting late afternoon sunbeams which filled the apartment caused Tjyerka’ssk’s head to expand to seventeen times its normal size.

Kevin Bacon stepped through her enlarged left nostril, wiped himself off with a bedspread, and offered to take her out for scones.

A week later, he starred in Footloose . . .

BRIAN LILLIE is a writer from Ann Arbor Michigan.

L. L. Madrid

Every Sunday my grandfather fishes at Ripple Pond. It’s an old habit, one anchored in boyhood. His mother allowed him to forgo church for fishing, as he was more contemplative by the water’s edge.

Today he’s wearing a neon orange baseball cap, his favorite for the last four decades. He looks maybe sixty. His age varies from week to week. Sometimes he’s as young as eight and others he’s the old man I knew. Always though, a toothpick juts from the corner of his mouth, often bouncing as if conducting the current.

During the initial sightings I confronted him, asking why he’d come, but he never answered. He wouldn’t even look at me. Instead, he’d wind his reel; grab his tackle and leave, disappearing at the tree line. I’ve spent six months of Sundays watching him fish.

When I was a kid he brought me here a fistful of times. The first outing he had a can of live worms. I didn’t want to bait the hook. The prospect of selecting a worm and impaling it was nauseating. Grandpa’s blue eyes narrowed when I’d asked him to skewer the bait for me. He spat, shook his head and said, “You got to do it yourself. Wouldn’t be honest otherwise.”

Fingers pinching a worm, I slid the wriggling creature onto the hook, pricking my finger in the process. Grandpa nodded his approval and reached into the front pocket of his shirt and handed me a toothpick. We didn’t speak again until after I got a nibble followed by a tug. A few cranks of the reel and I had a two-incher. Grandpa had me throw it back. It was my first catch and I wanted to keep it, but he insisted. My face went hot and words of protest bubbled inside me, but he offered up a rare smile and patted my back.

“It’s not about the catch,” he said.

“Then what’s the point?”

He held a finger to his lips and then gestured out toward the undulating liquid, the shifting variegations of cola-brown, peridot, and slate blue.

We grew comfortable sharing silence. Sitting side by side, our legs dangling from the dock as we both squinted at the sun like characters in a Rockwell painting. I contemplate those long-faded Sunday mornings, listing all the details I can conjure. The little yellow cooler. The entwining scents of pine and coffee. Feathered lures. Gooey orange bait. The whizzing, creaking whirl of the reel. There are neither hints nor harbingers suggesting he would continue the tradition after his death.

I wondered what, if anything, my grandfather remembers. I don’t know why I see him. No one else does. I brought Grammy here once as an experiment. Together we strolled circumnavigating the pond, as my eyes searched the shore, heart sinking. He didn’t show. Sensing my disappointment, Grammy squeezed my forearm. I haven’t brought anyone else.

Now, from under the shade of a great pine, I watch Grandpa rummaging through his tackle box, sifting its contents with just his fingertips. Taking careful steps I approach, my hand clenched tight, encasing an old pocketknife.

Sometimes he knows who I am. Mostly, he thinks I’m a stranger.

Others see him, not people who knew him, but joggers, dog walkers, and occasional anglers. They exchange nods, proof of awareness.

Today, I have a plan. My grandfather’s stare holds steadfast on the red and white bobber floating on the water below even as I crouch beside him. I lay a hand on his shoulder; it is solid and warm. At last, he looks at me and I reveal the pocketknife. The one he’d carried since Korea, the knife I’ve kept on me since his funeral. “You dropped this.”

The toothpick stills and there’s a glint in his eye. He shakes his head. “Hush now. You’ll scare the fish away.”

I sit beside him on the damp wooden planks. Dragonflies skim the water like thrown stones scattering the falling sunbeams. When I glance down at my legs I see that his are gone. I am alone on the dock. Next to me rests a solitary toothpick. A sigh of a laugh escapes me and I return my gaze to the pond.

L.L. MADRID lives in Tucson where she can smell the rain before it falls. She resides with her four-year-old daughter, an antisocial cat, and on occasion, a scorpion or two. Her work can be found lurking in various corners of the internet and at llmadrid.weebly.com.