Third Place in the Ceiling 200 Contest (2021)
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The Invisibles
You bear tally marks in your soul. One for every night spent moving further away from home. You lay the tallies end-to-end and hope they’ll stretch all the way home. Are 786 tallies enough to cover the distance from Dhaka to Delhi? How many more until you are dispatched around the world, until you trace a circle back home?
The man, the shapeshifting demon of the night, old today, young tomorrow. You burnt for an eternity. Now you’re all burnt coal and cinder. Drugged and bruised in dungeons and farmhouse basements, rich people parties as snacks carrying snacks, auctioned and swapped, or back to cages as unsold goods. Closing stock of Invisibles. Stowaways, runaways, all packed like sardines alongside the kidnapped.
Visions of freedom through sliver in a moving van. Posters of Prime Minister’s girl child empowerment policies reel by.
You will yourself to get back to working that hand pump in your village from where you were taken in the shapeshifter’s van, barely conscious. You swear you will beat the pump and get mother a full pot of water without cribbing or muttering curses this time. If only you could stack the tallies all the way back home.
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Mydhili R Varma has co-written anthologies titled Urban Shots: Bright Lights, Otherwise Engaged Journal (Vol 5), Word Doodle Lit Mag, Flora Fiction, The Elixir Magazine, Tfaun and Disquiet Arts. Her short story included in She Speaks anthology is being adapted into film to be aired on Amazon Prime. Her illustrated non-fiction titled #YOU TOO (A MISOGYNIST)? will be out in 2022. She lives in Coimbatore, India with her husband and two children.