In Accordance With

by Mandira Pattnaik

When you feel neglected, you should devour your husband instead of starving yourself, instead of wondering what ruins you haunt: says mother when I tell her about a slap, a chipped tooth, about brothers-in-law ogling, about mysterious cold beef and fermented rice beer in the husband’s bag, about the way my hair grays right down the parting, and I can’t answer her back the way I want, because there is an elopement, a marriage, there are kids, there’s more chance to fail than to be told you succeeded in doing something you had no idea of, and imagining another life, I place a kid on each hip, think of a place other than this, a man other than him, run an algorithm of how it might have worked out if it wasn’t concurrence back then smitten by love and blinded by promises, if it wasn’t being tired of hiding because a teenaged girl must be rightfully stalked, if the growing body parts weren’t something to be ashamed of, or if it was not being born at all, never, nothing, and walk to the well in the courtyard, the kids bawling because they’re hungry but stopping stunned when they see the water deep inside, dungeon-y dark, looking like a portal to another world, and combine hatefulness with helplessness, the way milk is helpless to boil over when too long on the vengeful flame, before contemplating whether or not to puke out the miserable stewed chicken heads chewed last night because I had no choice.

Mandira Pattnaik is an Indian writer published in The McNeese Review, Penn Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, Timber, Contrary, Quarter After Eight, and Best Small Fictions Anthology (2021), among others. Her writing has secured multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, BotN, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and listing in Wigleaf Top50 (2023). Nonfiction and stories on the way via Iron Horse Literary Review, Emerson Review, The Rumpus, and SAND Journal. Visit her at mandirapattnaik.com