“This girl is the best candidate for the job.”
“But did you see her hearing aid?”
“So what? She was able to hear us just fine.”
“May be. But you know how it is…the cost of adjustments, dependence, medical bills, and so on…and bad publicity if you let them go later… Let’s avoid the mess!”
Mother-in-law: Your lipstick is too dull. Use a brighter shade!
After complying...
Husband: Your lipstick is too bright. Use a natural shade!
After complying…
Father-in-law: Why do you have to paint your lips? It kills the skin!
After complying…
Mother-in-law: Why don’t you use lipstick? Your face looks so dull!
She stepped in the ‘mandapa’ trembling in anticipation of seeing him for the first time but a ‘sehera’ covered his face.
He looked at her eagerly but her face was veiled.
So, they wait until they are bound together forever.
The baby girl’s cries announced her arrival in the world.
Her mother’s sobs announced her impending departure.
-Female Infanticide was and still is very prevalent practice in India. With advent of Sonography, this is now replaced with Female Featicide among literates.
The woman had a strange gleam in her eyes while she held her newborn—a girl—in her arms for the first time. It unnerved the Gynecologist as she asked: “How are you feeling?”
“Relieved!” replied her patient grimly. “Her father made my father miserable all these years. He is bound to love his first child though. Someday, my father will be avenged!”
When parents arranged the marriage...
She: Please don’t make me marry him, I am in love with another.
Mother: Please understand my dear. It is a matter of our family’s honour.
When she returned after a few months of marriage…
She: Please don’t send me back. He drinks, beats and rapes me every night.
Mother: No! You must go back…for our family’s honour.
When she eloped with ‘another’…
Mother: I wish she was born dead. She dishonoured our family.
Something I have heard of a thousand times as a matter of fact… As life of every woman… What a shame!
By Jayne Martin
At the mailboxes, I share sidelong glances with the neighbors from 3C and 4A as he arrives home. “Evening, ladies,” he says, the stench of drink in his wake as he staggers up the stairs.
In bed, I pull the quilt over my head to shut out his rage. Turn up the television when your body slams against the thin wall we share. Avert my eyes from your bruised flesh when we meet on the landing.
The newspapers say we were complicit. I can still hear your cries.
Jayne Martin is a 2017 Pushcart nominee, 2016 winner of Vestal Review’s VERA award, and a 2018 Best Small Fictions nominee. Her work has appeared in Literary Orphans, Spelk, Crack the Spine, Midwestern Gothic, MoonPark Review, Blink-Ink, Cleaver, Connotation Press and Hippocampus among others.
She is confused and lonely. She has no recollection of traveling to this bleak place…a dark mountain road, lit only by yellow scary moon, leading to some ancient temple.
Has her son dumped her here as a payback? Afterall, she had rigged the gas stove for his first wife; she was too defiant! One matchstick and… Poof! And she had hit the second one many times. A push down the stairs had killed their unborn baby? Good riddance. She smiles. Once she finishes this one, she will marry her son to someone with money, not a begger like this one.
Her son would never fight back. He doesn’t have the backbone, just like his father. But then, why is she here? She had slept in her bed with a chest pain. Must be a nightmare. Someone will surely wake her up soon.
But she has to see that temple. It spooks and intrigues her equally. She enters the place. It is dark and eerily quiet. A lift opens. She enters and it goes down, forever.
It opens to show a semi-dark room in which people are walking around like Zombies. She can hear people screaming in pain in a distance. Scared she turns towards the lift but it is closed with no button to call it back. She pounds at the door until she looks at her hands: grey and mottled with a rancid smell…like everyone else.
I was waiting in the old barn where we had spent our childhood plotting mischiefs. It had been twenty years!
But I knew she will come today. There was no where she would rather be and nothing could stop her now—Becoming ghost had its merits!
It was difficult to start a conversation while our families milled around us. We had only ten minutes to decide.
She took out her phone ‘replying an urgent text’. I received a message from an unknown number, “Let’s run away from them all!”
She was smiling!
Short Stories 