The Girl Who Never Cried
Flash Fiction
She has forever been in awe of a teardrop, that thing of fiery purity she cannot produce. So why should her mother, knowing this full well, has to stand so close and make her jealous? The woman has gone too far already with her chin dripping like gambrel eaves in cloudburst, eyes rivaling each other to plop out bulbous swells, wink after wink.
‘Stop it, mom,’ she wants to yell.
Stop it. Who else is crying here?
As far back as she can remember, all she’s managed in place of tears is a sterile sting, an angry burning at the spot where breath sculpted itself into sighs. The doctor who first examined her eyes couldn’t contain his shock at all the parched ducts and a pair of lacrymal glands shriveled as walnuts. She still remembers his own tear, a pink film of honesty and professional inadequacy.
The condition will anger her for she wants to sense how it feels to be this mediator between pain and water. The gift of tears, she believes, is what defines a human. She fumed at her brother who thought animals cried, too:
‘That’s not sadness. That’s reflex, a dumb hoax.’
In reality, it’s hard for her to accept even a beast would beat her to it.
Her drunk dad used to pinch her and cry on her behalf until she was well into her teens. He would snatch the cross from the home altar and hold it aloft, seemingly to ward off some demonic dryness. He’d then go off to pinch either of his other two children on their inner thighs and derive a good deal of relief from the wet and snorty yells of mere little mortals.
One cherry-scented afternoon, when she was kissed on the lips for the first time, she had a chance to be all the more dismayed about her defect. There was, she could see, more to teary eyes than just distress. She couldn’t express precisely how she felt about the kiss. She found herself grinning like a witch, hissing, and huffing. The boyfriend laughed on, helplessly misreading her gestures for veiled ecstasy. She went on to slap him not because she hated the whole thing. She slapped him, goosebumps still live along her arm, because he failed to see her invisible tears. Tears forged of shock. Of disbelief. Of vulnerability.
Now, here, she is confronting a rather provocative crowd. Her mother isn’t the lone one weeping. A veritable race, as it were, of damp cheeks and sniffles was on. She wants to reach down to the ground and grab a fist of dirt to caulk their damned eyes, gag this blabbing. Or snatch one of these spotless sheets and go around wiping. She wants to scream at every moist eye and up at the violent sun when two men stepped forth and closed her coffin.
© Sethuraj Nair, August 2021
