alien
By Yashaswini Sharma
It’s ten o’clock but it should be eight / and you’re sitting in a group of friends / sharing stories, gossips, histories, like the time he keyed his boss’s car / and your heart is racing because you don’t know why / their words become foreign in an instant / flying skyward like moths that don’t know they’ll live a single day. Laughing can be defiance / so you force yourself to laugh in a language you do not know / and your eyes find a spider hanging from the ceiling / and your throat burns with envy / knowing it can build its home anywhere. It’s ten o’clock when it should be eight / and you look back / to find there is no home left / just a stretch of black marked with hot white asphalt. It has been a while since / you felt something like this / like looking out an airplane window / seeing space pocked with stars / and knowing there is a somewhere but it is not here. How does it make sense that only the interim / between leaving and arriving feels real? How do you justify / a life sustained by mere punctuation? Heat creeps up your side / and you want to go home / not to a point in geography / but to a being in the past that was you / but isn’t anymore. You were always told that / everything good will be left behind / and you cannot fantasise your life / perimetered by warm yellow pendant lamps / and though you know that / to receive you need to give / but it might just be too late.
Yashaswini Sharma is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, and artist currently based in Lithuania. Her work appears in National Flash Fiction Day Journal, Vellichor Literary and is forthcoming in Easy Does It Zine. Her flash fiction was longlisted for the Welkin Mini Writing Prize.