On Our Anniversary by Mandira Pattnaik
Associate fiction editor Zoa Coudret on today’s bonus story: “On Our Anniversary” drew me in with its clipped sentences and poetic structure. Each moment is brimming with the sense of a shared history. The imagery travels far through space and time, and in surprising directions, but it feels intimately connected to the moment of tension at its core.
On Our Anniversary
Trip back home from the Piazza is hackneyed as soap’s plot / Dull like our old Fiat’s engine thrum / The road coughs up miles of dust and travelers’ debris / I shuffle about, you recline like a resigned cosmonaut / Bums burn on red faux-leather upholstery you got for a bargain / It's fuming as Martian soil / We excavate carcasses to pass hours.
Dig one bone at a time / Chew on them, spit out profanities like gum / Bearing vows for thirty long years on a slow solar Ferris wheel is sickening us / Been in the park too long in masks / Or was it a Masquerade Ball? Our fossils will be discovered one of these days / wearing each other into calcified habit.
When time wraps around, we'll let Hipparchus of Rhodes plot our positions / Then be the ones that meet on the beach / collecting cowrie shells too few to wear around our necks / Now our journey cooped up together is a zoo enclosure / Where the car stops at a traffic light, pedestrians watch.
We’re like mutant turtles trained to be civil / Nearing home, I stop shouting / Stop thinking about your endless disclosures / You don’t try anymore, you’re done measuring the length of my silences / Gases pouring out of our volcanoes form an atmosphere in which foggy clouds sail / We mark the corner café we always haunted.
When the car turns the final bend / only regolith, rock fragments, breccias / I view the dried-up river beds / where once flowed water / Scattered, barren / I hope this trip is our last / you smear freckles of doubt, disgust on your face / I count the lines like Scalinata stairs, chronicle them like history.
Mandira Pattnaik's work has appeared or is shortly due in Watershed Review, Splonk, EllipsisZine, Ilanot Review, Bending Genres, and Amsterdam Quarterly, among others. She's been nominated for Best of the Net 2020 by Citron Review. Tweets @MandiraPattnaik.
