My first time in Miami is tiny cups of sweet Cuban cortadito; and going to the Miami Open with my husband to join the crowds cheering for Carlos “Carlitos” Alcaraz, the Spanish teenage sensation and World #1; and rainy…
Essay by Rachel León • I met Nora Decter over Zoom when we were tasked to outline her forthcoming novel, What’s Not Mine. We were both fellows in Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program, paired to work together on our…
Snap Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights…
When Ford made love to Calla, she felt something in him fight. It wasn’t against her ugliness. That matter was settled business, though Calla, in her youth, had held onto the idea that she was a winter-apple sort of…
We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark. It’s dark when we pile out of our secondhand pickup. My father, my mother. My brother and me. It’s dark when we start walking the rutted, sopping dirt road that…
BAŅUTA RUBESS pioneered feminist theatre and contemporary opera to national renown in Canada and Latvia. She has lived in four countries and writes in two languages. She has written plays, libretti, radio drama, television biopics, stories, and…
It’s all a blur. It can be separated into two five-year periods: using alone and using with Haley. Haley had piercings everywhere: the bridge of her nose, her septum, her nipples, her belly button. She had stretched lobes—one had…
Indiana, in our cold one-car garage, motes of dust falling sideways, the sunlight diffused by the snow covering the ground outside, and we watched Apá working the punching bag, his untaped fists flashing with each swing. Behind my brother…
Content Warning—miscarriage I see my anesthesiologist at the movies and it surprises me in the way that seeing someone outside the setting you know them does. There is a prick of recognition and then my mind scrambles to…
My daughter, Savi, instructs me to wear shoes when I go for my morning walk. She says it’s not considered exercise otherwise. I tell her my toes feel imprisoned in shoes and slide my feet into chappals before I…
Going for a walk, I’ve noticed, stimulates my thought processes. Perhaps it has something to do with getting my limbs into motion. I’ve also noticed that when I’m at a crossroads or when I’m confronting a decision or a problem, my thoughts tend to spin faster.
And so, I send my main character on a walk, where thought-paths spring forth in her brain, sometimes divergent, sometimes intersecting, sometimes knitting together. Through these spurts of brain activity, she attempts to unravel and understand a not-so-harmonious relationship with her daughter, a typical teenager. For this single mother with one child, the conflicts are both difficult to process and hard to accept.
Being a parent is not easy. Rules need to be enforced, boundaries must be drawn. It’s no surprise then, that children often wish they had different parents. Some, like my protagonist’s daughter, even form strong attachments with adults outside of their home.
What would it feel like to be a parent who observes this “outside” relationship? How must a parent deal with their child’s obvious preference? Should the parent swallow the painful knowledge and allow the child the freedom to bond with others?
Sorting through internal dialogue can be knotty. It gets more complicated when the child, annoyed or withdrawn at home, transforms into an affectionate, considerate person in someone else’s company.
The mother in my story struggles to find that fine balance between being a parent and indulging her child, between dealing with her own inner turmoil and wanting a relationship with her daughter, because at the heart of it all, she longs to keep her little family close, together and whole.
Her circumstances gave me the scenario, the walk allowed me to weave her jumbled thoughts and feelings into a story, and thus, “Flapping Wings and a Shoeless Walk” came into being.
SUDHA BALAGOPAL is honored to have her writing in many fine journals including CRAFT, Split Lip Magazine, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her novella-in-flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. She has work selected for Best Microfiction 2022 and The Best Small Fictions 2022. Find her on Twitter @authorsudha.
