Aloka

Mammi was old. She could feel it in her very pulsating forehead, in the increasing number of steps it took her to get from the kerosene stove to the well. Her silk saris (she would have no other) dragged on the hot floor of the Madras house. Somehow she felt like she weighed nothing today—even though she was dragging, and despite the age that pressurized her into lethargy. It was strange; she was so attached to this house that she knew every pattern, every mosaic on this inscrutable floor. How long had she been here, twelve, thirteen, seventeen, thirty five years? Was she really so young, so slender of waist, so round of hip that she attracted the eye of the neighbors? Or was she organically part of the house, something beautiful and interesting at first, only to become expected?

The last dosa she made on the kerosene stove was different; it had been made with rice flour. This was a new thing … so this is how restaurants were able to make it of this particular texture? So she sat to eat it on the metal plate alone, at this ripe old age of her existence. She heard the sounds of demolition. An empty chair, formerly occupied by the cranky old journalist (who had once been the cranky young journalist who hired her to keep up with the ever increasing housework), rattled in the wind. It was intense, this wicker, that scratched against the floor. Specters of people milling around in this large house vanished into the bright monsoon morning, where the rain hovered in the atmosphere, threatening a stormy tantrum. Who knew when it would come? There was a crash.

Her heart beating, she held the arm of the chair, which shook violently. “Oh yes,” said a voice from outside, “I love the sound of that damal-dishoom! It’s the sound of the Gods. Indra’s bolt of destruction! Shiva’s wrath! Yama’s angry hands clutching the neck of innocents—” (And when he was asked by another what he meant, he shrugged. Couldn’t he be melodramatic for once?) But in this stunning moment of reality, Mammi forgot where she was, except that she felt the cool stone of the floor on her back, her bare back, and her sari, once silken with new luster was now drab with dust as it came off her shoulders and unraveled in the sheer heat. But how odd … she felt cold …

__________________
My beard grows to my toes --
I never wears no clothes
I just wrap my hair
around my bare,
and down the road I goes.

Aloka

Thanks for your review. I'll try to take each of the comments as they came.

Pulsating forehead--old, veiny forehead. I tried some imagery there. Perhaps it didn't work.


Heh ... sorry. I forgot a comma before alone in that sentence...

and then,

"Somehow she felt like she weighed nothing today—even though she was dragging, and despite the age that pressurized her into lethargy."

and I should have removed the "and" from there and said, "perhaps it was to spite the age that threatened to pressure her into lethargy."

I am from the Indian subcontinent myself; we do have mosaic floors, which do, unfortunately, heat up. And the older generation simply preferred silk saris because they were more formal. Her employer probably gifted many of these to her. They're really not that much more expensive than the regular saris and she would have had them passed down to her through generations, perhaps.

I mentioned demolition because it was the house around her that was getting blasted. Yama, the god of Death, was mentioned because she was aging. She wasn't supposed to be there, but she felt an attachment to the house.

The reason why there are so many things that aren't tied up was because this was a flash fiction with a very low limit... so I was very limited in my word choice. That's why I had to throw in a lot of oblique references to get the reader to visualize the moment at which she died.

Thanks for your review! I look forward to hearing from you again.

__________________
My beard grows to my toes --
I never wears no clothes
I just wrap my hair
around my bare,
and down the road I goes.

Scratches

Ditto to Mia's comments. You had some beautiful imagery in here and I think it should be longer, more elaborate. Simple flash doesn't fit with intricate mosaics and saris to me.

__________________

Never get so attached to a poem
you forget truth that lacks lyricism
and never draw so close to the heat
that you forget that you must eat
- En Gallop, Joanna Newsom

jetmanjake

I like your descriptions (aside from the phrasing issues) but I feel like I want a little more action, or at least I want the descriptions to help move the story along a little more. Though it's flash fiction I still want a little more story.

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The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. - Robert Cormier