An offering of flash fiction in which a compassionate soul steadily finds her voice….
by: Garima Chhikara
Echo had a gift for affirming others’ needs and desires. Her mother called it kindness, a woman’s duty that would earn her a place in a man’s heart and home. It wasn’t a curse, she insisted, just the way she was born.
“Busy?” Echo repeated, her voice catching his last word.
“Yes, I really am busy,” her current boyfriend said, crunching on his keypad and her patience.
“Busy.” Her voice circled, like confetti trapped inside a balloon, floating just out of reach.
“You think I’m making excuses?” he said, teeth clenched.
When Echo’s last boyfriend was leaving, she was crouched on the floor grieving for her dead cat, whom she had to carry alone to the cremation center because he wouldn’t answer the call. She had taken his advice on the treatment, though he’d never had pets. She took his advice on all matters — just so he felt important, just so he stayed.
“Not this dress, no.”
No?
“Pink is so bimbo. Ugh.”
Bimbo. Ugh.
“Don’t give me boring eyes; I know you want it.”
Want it.
While she whimpered like an abandoned animal, she wished she didn’t have those bothersome bangs in her eyes that he thought looked hot on her. She thought of the tight, oiled braids her mother made for her, each one tied with her own beliefs, no loose strands left for Echo to make something of her own. It didn’t matter that Echo belonged to another generation or that she could have her own beliefs. How would she have her hair, if asked? She didn’t know; she’d never thought about it.
“For you, a layered cut.”
Layered cut.
Before he left, he placed a jacket over her shoulders, where a string of her top had fallen. She resented him for that kindness, but was grateful for the silence. It let her scream what she yearned to say. At first, he’d seemed translucent, his needs too easy to see, but by the end, he was all flesh and hunger, chewing through her words until nothing was left to say. He treated her like a task, a dull nightly duty like brushing teeth. A task set by cruel gods, who cursed her and took her voice. A task he could toy with for convenience, for entertainment, and ignore when it didn’t suit him.
She punched his chest and shoved him against the wall. “At least make some excuse for yourself.” The shoving and the repetition of those words — her words this time — went on long after he was gone.
And now, again: “Excuses?” She spoke to the suffocating air.
He didn’t hear her or didn’t bother to respond. This time, silence let her fist-punch the inside of the balloon until it burst open.
Silence that had undone her before was now a beginning.
Her name, she realized, didn’t have to be a fate burdened with the world’s weight. It could have a purpose. Wasn’t it a shield against those stifling balloons that pressed in on her, decorations meant to make her life look playful?
“Hello, I’m your listener. My name is Echo,” she said to a stranger on the line, one of many who called just to be heard.
“I can?”
Can.
“Really?”
Really.
Silence.
Silence that holds like a hug.
Garima Chhikara is a writer from Bangalore, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Forge Literary Magazine, Hobart, Cherry Tree, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find her at garimachhikara.com.
