Death Wish

He was dead as a doornail. And to think it could have been me. The icy wind whispered into my ears. My skin felt papery. And my tongue tasted the metallic blood splattered across my skirt, shining like the sequins on the Diwali outfit I had brought to wear. The thought of wearing the zari embroidered skirt had become like a noose tightening around my neck. I tried to run, but my legs refused, reminding me of the times Rahul cornered me in the bathroom of my house in Mumbai. He never did that when everyone was home. Diwali lights turned the streets into a wonderland and the women and the children walking on it turned into fairies with their shimmering clothes and tinkling laughter. I could never ever be like them. I could never ever even imagine it. This isn’t your street and neither is this your bazaar, they cried looking at me. The tainted kurtas of honesty and purity kept me awake at night. Sometimes, I would open the windows and cover the skies with my sequined, silvery white dupatta before crawling back to bed. Little Me knew it helped her dream better of a cozy, golden future far away from the gray, dirty reality that seemed to accumulate like festering secrets in the corners of her house. And one day it would all stop flowing, the blood and the hurt and the shame. Until then I will still feel the cold, white skull of a night upon me. Jaisi karni waisi bharni—what goes around comes around cries the vast green fields as I wait for him to never wake up from his death laced with ice-cold blood and lust. 

Roopa Raveendran Menon lives in Dubai, UAE. Some of her short stories have been published in Corium magazine, Nunum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best of Microfiction. Her debut middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents, has just been published by Fitzroy Books. She tweets erratically @roopamenon01