[408 words]
a half-lover brands me a schemer—
an iron rod accusation
pressed against my throat,
welded into my forearms.
professes his regret as soon as
the gears begin groaning in my brain,
wires tightening, slap-bands snapping scarlet
against the concrete skin of my dreams.
look, he says. just look how
the village folk pinch their children
by the scruffs, yank them backward into doorways,
palms shadowing their teeth as they mutter:
that one, she’s got nails sharp, mouth sharp,
and a heart blunter.
a seamstress with whip-like wrists
once scattered salt in my unmended dress.
the butcher’s son claims I carved
all my hunger into his back.
I pass through each swinging wooden door,
a practiced peruser, stepping back and forth
with a neat swish of my skirt. look, he says,
some might worry: how you feel too quick, too little—
or not at all. in response, my body unbuttons
and shrugs itself off.
there is, we agree, something fundamentally wrong
with this pattern: how I give too slow, too little—
or not at all; how as a little child, I never tumbled
into a cat’s cradle of love;
how when he and I go running
with the village children near the dry-throated well,
giggling shoving tugging each other by the sleeves,
I knit false knots into the rope—
loopholes in gravitational laws,
just so I alone won’t fall.
he jostles my shoulder,
challenges me to climb into the well.
a day’s play, he says, it’ll be safe.
everyone’s watching. hurry.
I gingerly finger the stone,
bunching my fingers around a line of rope.
he leaps in not a second after me
and we descend,
phantom damp
seeping through my skirt.
he makes talk and
I answer as I’m supposed to.
he makes vows.
I don’t.
the walls bruise our shifting palms as
we hitch ourselves back to the surface.
later, I sprint back to the well and find
the moon kissing the stone full on its mouth,
and my chest aches to occupy another body.
know this: one day
the village folk will nail me into a cedar box
and forget to search my wrist for a pulse.
me, lips drained of blood, salted white.
know that my habit of loving only in halves—
it all blooms from loneliness,
spiderwebs fraying at my seams.
know that I scheme not because
I don’t feel but because my feelings
have teeth—incisions too fast, too slow, and
never not at all.
Tejal Doshi (born in 2006) is a YA & speculative fiction writer and poet from India. Her work appears in Paper Lanterns Lit, The Echo Lit, Blue Marble Review, Nightjar Magazine, etc. She loves fantasy heists, twenty one pilots, and all things meta. Find her fangirling on Instagram @probably_tejal or on Twitter/X @entropy_75 and being somewhat professional on tejaldoshi.carrd.co
