In a shell
It looks like a dagger. Flash fiction by Swetha Amit
It is a strange, looking shell with sharp spikes that my ten-year-old daughter brings home from her school excursion at the beach. It looks like a dagger. When I ask her about it, she shrugs. Sand is still stuck on her hands; her fingers are moving up and down, her palms are sweaty, and occasionally, her eyes are averting my gaze.
It's not unusual for her to collect little souvenirs from her nature excursions—dried leaves and flowers, sometimes earthworms whenever it rains. Yet this shell instills a strange uneasiness in me. She places it on the table and excuses herself to wash up, a little retreating figure dressed in pink with hunched shoulders and a slight limp gait. I could hear the water streaming from her shower. Outside, the light diminishes, casting eerie shadows on the walls. I switch on the lights in the living room and stare at the empty shelves—the books now safely tucked in her father's suitcase after he left us for another woman.
It all started with that overseas conference trip, followed by frequent absences, late working hours, and the sickly scent of poison by Eaves a Laurent on his coat—the one he always coaxed me to wear. I told him the smell made me nauseous. He later gave up, disgruntled by my choice of Davidoff Cool Water.
I wonder if she has chin-length hair that bobs around her face. My fingers coil around the split ends of my shoulder-length limp, brown, coarse hair. I wonder if she dislikes children too, ruminating over that time when he said he wasn't ready and almost convinced me to abort our child. That led to our worst fight. I wonder if she has washed-out abs and firm breasts, feeling my sagging ones and the folds of fat in my stomach beneath my loose sweatshirt. I wonder if she has a smoother complexion, running my fingers over my skin battered with acne eruptions from all that stress. I brood about those nights spent tending to the baby and ignoring his needs.
Later, when she grew older, he began to show slight traces of change. She'd accompany him on his fishing and hiking excursions and those evenings at the beach, where they would build those sandcastles, decorate them with shells, and watch the seagulls fly. I wonder if I was too resistant to his desire to go on more vacations, fearful of her slipping grades. I wonder if it was my daughter's shyness and social anxiety that made me turn my full attention to her, once again neglecting his needs. I wonder if it was because I could not converse beyond her troubles about coping with school. At first, I didn't think much of his frequent travels until he announced that he would be leaving forever one day. No showdown, no drama. Just a stone-cold silence that left a deafening impact in this house.
The time before he left seems like a distant era compared to my current situation. My current situation renders me helpless: a woman reeling from the aftermath of a painful separation, a single mother of a child being bullied at school for growing up in a broken home. It makes me want to weep, makes me loathe him, love her, and loathe him even more. The weight of those unsaid cuss words lingers on my tongue. I suppress them out of fear of not wanting to appear scary in front of my daughter and drive her further away.
The shower in my daughter's bathroom has stopped. I can hear her open the bathroom door, enter her bedroom, and shut the door. Silence lingers until I hear her tapping her hairbrush on her dressing table. At first, it's just a soft sound, but it eventually becomes loud. My stomach churns into knots. I wonder how long she has indulged in this habit. I stare at the spiky shell on the table.
He picked up a similar-looking shell on our honeymoon in Kuai. He always had a penchant for strange things. The shell was white with traces of brown, spiky, and sharp. It was bigger than the one my daughter brought home today. It gave me the creeps, and I threw it away, much to his chagrin.
I now pick up the spiky shell on the table and clutch it tightly, feeling a surge of emotions. The suffering and repressed rage find their way out of my lips. I holler the names I've been wanting to call him until my lungs ache. It is drowned by the tapping sound of my daughter's hairbrush. The spiky edges make my hand bleed. I hurl the shell out of the window into the world plunged in darkness. I feel a momentary sense of relief. But my hand still hurts, my heart still feels heavy, and my head feels unusually dizzy. The tapping sound from my daughter's bedroom has stopped. She opens the door. I lean against the table, trying to steady myself.
Swetha Amit is the author of two chapbooks, Cotton Candy from the Sky and Mango Pickle in Summer. An MFA graduate from the University of San Francisco, her works appear in Had, Flash Fiction Magazine, Maudlin House, Barzakh, Oyez Review, and others. She has received three Pushcart and four Best of the Net nominations. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and daughter. Visit her website: https://swethaamit.com
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