ISSUE FOUR: “For Two Blue Lines” by Hema Nataraju

For Two Blue Lines

Yesterday it was strawberries. Today, it's dirt.

After Sanjay leaves for work, I breathe easy. There’s an overgrown rose bush in my backyard garden. I kneel beside it, submit myself to that shrine. With my bare hands, I dig at the roots, tearing open the layer of hard, cracked mud until I reach the soft, damp earth beneath. I grab clumps of it and squish it in my palms, trying to squeeze the fertility out of it, and put it in my mouth.

It tastes of generations of rose plants, of mothers and daughters who flowered and withered and flowered again.

The sun warms my head in blessing. In that moment, loneliness stops gnawing under my skin. I’m understood. I’m free. Two mynah birds flit around me. One for sorrow, two for joy . . .

I’ve stifled this feeling for Sanjay, but now hope soars in my chest like an untethered helium balloon.

I go inside and bring out a little notebook that I've hidden in the rice barrel. “Dirt” is last in the list of pregnancy cravings of women, of mothers, in my family.

I check it off, and I hope, I pray, I beg for something to take root inside me.

Hema Nataraju

Hema is an Indian-American writer living in Singapore with her husband and their two kids. Her work has appeared in The Sunlight Press, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Aerogram, The Brown Orient, the National Flash-Fiction Day anthology, and in a couple of print anthologies. She blogs at www.hemas-mixedbag.com and tweets as m_ixedbag.

Headshot: Sriram Iyer

“FOR TWO BLUE LINES” IS A WINNER OF THE BEST MICROFICTION AWARD FOR 2020!

Photo Credit: Staff