Three Stories
Nanofictions
Switching back and forth from reality to reality, it is surprising that one conveniently does not become like hot glass suddenly put in ice water.
He hadn’t lost faith as much as he just put it on hold. Religion’s presence in his quotidian life remained, though it did not hold his wrists with any boldness. Rather, it was muted, almost a whisper — almost silent. Like the possessions of a loved one who has gone on a long trip, it sits familiarly in drawers and on shelves, gathering a fine film of gray and awaiting a return.
One day, he slid down the bathroom wall and tottered there in his worn white underwear, back pushing against the wallpaper, feet pushing against the pink marble floor. Shuddering, hands on either side of his head, he cradled himself like a lover. He hovered here for a long time, until his feet went numb with the weight of his crouched body, until his feet were floating two inches above the pink veins, and his uselessness sprang out of the walls like a flowered banshee.
He stood up. Taking the step to the mirror over the sink, he believed it was gone, and that the world around him was regaining its balance. The calm that crept across his skull scurried away like some timid forest creature as soon as both hands laid themselves on the white porcelain. Crushed. Just like the label said on the tin of tomatoes he had bought last week to make lasagna for that dinner party. He had thought it much too violent for tomatoes. Crushed. It wasn’t something you expected in such a clean can, it wasn’t something you expected for things without bones. His gaze moved slowly up himself, pointedly, as if studying to catch some irregularity between what he saw in front of him, and what he usually saw when he looked down. Finally, the eyes rested on themselves.
He was up because all of a sudden, in the middle of a sob, he had wondered, How do I look? This unbridled self-exposure clinging to his face. I must look ridiculous, maybe repugnant. Like a tourist with too much élan trying to make room for himself in a culture that was complete without an outsider’s eyes. The quivers resumed, up until the moment he looked at his mouth. It was contorted in a cartoon grimace, in something he did not recognize. He continued crying until he looked at his eyes. He considered how he hated the space he filled, that space, the space his nose treads into, the space the tips of his nails fill, the space his tongue sits in. Perhaps he could tear himself apart into little beans, tiny beans to be smeared and flushed away. His face was damp paper and ready to be ripped gingerly into bits of old newspaper anyhow.
He leaned his forehead against the other forehead and breathed the uneven breath of a child who has just found his mother again. He closed his eyes. He thought about the oil in his skin leaving a misshapen oval on the mirror as he stepped back.
I’ve felt like I’ve felt, he said. But I can’t be positive. There are so many variables, so many options; who’s to say for sure?
Sure. And then a pause, and then, Sure. That makes sense.
They sat against the bricks next to one another, some distance apart, faced by the trees and walled in by the innuendo. Don’t open your mouth or you’ll have to swallow. Sometimes he twittered in this space so much she imagined herself punching him down to a stump. This urge, this urge that became almost unbearable at times, had nothing to do with what nestled between his legs and hers. This urge arose, like a wanted weed, from sheer annoyance. How despicable he is, she would think somewhat triumphantly as she felt herself vibrating next to him. Satisfied with simply pawing at the possibility dangling in front of his face. Why doesn’t he live? Such apathy. Such . . . helplessness. Why doesn’t he feel how her blood is pulsing, racing, almost as if to escape her body entirely, round and round, it spins, it makes you dizzy.
He shuffles from foot to foot, his eyes focused on something that is too far to really see anyway.
The day of the dream, the sun had been a perfect egg yolk surrounded by the albumen of translucent clouds. She can’t remember if she has the same name as she sleeps, but she can remember that she is a child, pudgy maybe, and that her hair is still the same foreign black-brown as it winds frantically against the hot wet air. She also remembers she is completing a kindergarten assignment: What is your mother’s name? What is your father’s name? And that she replies to the paper, Jennifer and David, because these were normal names. These names she proudly knows out loud, but she feels ashamed of the real ones inside her curly head. It is an elegant pain to think on it now, because now she feels repulsion toward the honest attempt at mastering her interweaving with the Real People; shame is layered upon previous shame in an onion of self-regret. Until this moment, she had known she was fine.
They swirled cerulean around her head, thoughts, like hair does underwater. She sat up in her darkened bed, concentrating. She tried to grab one as it skittered past her nose, but it first sped, then slinked, around the corner of her head, gleaming, mocking. No matter. Turning forward again, concentrating again. Finally, she catches one. She remembers worming her way into the tight pink space between eyeball and eyelid of the man who stood, without expectation, near her car window at the corner of 288 and Almeda. She had walked around with him the rest of the day without telling him and saw that it was both much worse and not as bad as she had thought. They sat together and she squeezed into his eyes.
Tasneem Mandviwala is based somewhere between Chicago and Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Faithfully Feminist, altmuslimah.com, and thefemlitmag.com.
