A Moon Is a Moon Is a Moon
By Mandira Pattnaik
Warning: domestic violence
Because you’re the moon, Mother thinks you’re full of circles and spots, and never consistent — rebellious and sulking, often hiding in hoodie jackets, known to break china even with a sponge scrubber, and mostly saying what is best avoided, making mistakes. Sister is better. She poses no troubles, hangs on the wall like a dish cloth, never speaks, never does anything at all. Then Aunt Cheema comes visiting, shepherding guests known to her, strangers to us, and you suspect it’s the same as two weeks before, one that’ll make your family smaller by taking one away. It’s Sister who goes first, her hair plaited, jasmine flowers in them, carrying a tray of sherbet in finest wine glasses, she greets and listens while they make plans, and speaks only in consenting nods even though it’s her marriage they’re talking about. You’re told to walk to the store, with a list of items that you’re sure aren’t urgent, but what can circles do when they’re rolled about, and it’s best to stay away— grooms are known to prefer one to the other, as if they were items on a shelf. When you get back from the store the guests are gone, the atmosphere at home is loud and vengeful, the conversation dents the walls. It emerges that when the prospective groom asked Sister if she could cook Bhindi-aloo-keema, or embroider, or tie bandhani threads (and you know the answer is no), Sister, being land unchanging, consented to all, and now it was a matter of truth versus dare.
Because you’re the moon, Sister suggests it’s the circles, well-rounded, that are the problem: that you’re likely a positron having a positive charge that attracts men of marriageable age, but that the men are repelled by her because she’s firmer and leaner, the nuclei within, a collision with annihilation. When you wonder how she’d know, because the grooms never came to meet you, she says it’s because of how their eyes rove and peek behind the drawn curtain.
Because you’re the moon, you’re still the moon when many months later Sister, like land, unchanging, cannot escape when the man she was married to is merciless to her while his family watches, like good riddance. Your Mother is told only a day after.
Because you are the moon, you make yourself small thereafter, waning, waning, waning, until you completely disappear, so men know you’re unreliable and they never come near.
Mandira Pattnaik is the author of collections Anatomy of a Storm-Weathered Quaint Townspeople (2022, Fahmidan Publishing, Poetry), Girls Who Don’t Cry (2023, Alien Buddha Press, Flash Fiction) and Where We Set Our Easel (forthcoming, Stanchion Publishing, Novella). Mandira’s work has appeared in The McNeese Review, Penn Review, Quarterly West, Citron Review, Passages North, DASH, Miracle Monocle, Timber Journal, Contrary, Watershed Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, and Prime Number Magazine, among others. She edits for trampset and Vestal Review. Learn more at mandirapattnaik.com.
Image credit: chiaralily via a Creative Common license.
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