I’m digging graves for rats by Aekta Khubchandani
Editor-in-chief Jennifer A. Howard on today’s bonus short: Aekta Khubchandani’s narrator is digging graves for rats, and so are you and so am I. While the project here—again: digging graves for rats—is exhausting, the full sun is out, and the I becomes a we, leaving the reader at least hopeful that the work can be done.
I’m digging graves for rats
under a sun-full sky with shovels and spades. Shredding the sweltering sun on their living bodies, tossing them black and dead, just like that. The sun is neatly sliced in these ditches I’m digging. I’d dig with bare hands if I had to. Like a mole. Harvey Weinstein gets sentenced to prison for 23 years after 82 women break their silence. The other rats are breeding relentlessly, outside burrows, gutters, pipes, subways, yards, fields, under houses, in houses and their basements. A woman passing by asks me if I’m digging for myself. Or for my family. Or for families and households and communities. She asks me if there are rats in my house. I tell her that we need extra graves because we can’t keep track of rat numbers. Anyone can turn out to be a rat tomorrow. My words spread among troops of women. I dreamt of rats nibbling on my toes and the horror has torn open my skin. The thinnest trace of sun and we’re out again. We’re all digging graves, nodding in agreement to the hum of heat.
Aekta Khubchandani is a writer and poet from Bombay. She is the founder of Poetry Plant Project, a safe and inclusive space to nourish poems. She is currently matriculating her MFA in creative writing from The New School in New York. Her recent fiction “Love in Bengali Dialect,” winner of Pigeon Pages Fiction contest is nominated for Best American Short Fiction anthology. Her poems were awarded the winner of honorable mention by Paul Violi Prize. Her work has been longlisted for Toto Funds the Arts twice in 2017 & 2018. Her work is published in Epiphany, Jaggery Lit, VAYAVYA, The Aerogram, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. She has performed spoken word poetry in India, Bhutan, and New York. She lives with her plants, Gulabo and Kit-Kat, by the waterfront.
