At the hospital, Manjula struggles to answer the questions about her parents. Manjula never knew her father, and the humble labors of animal husbandry—the feeding, bathing, and care of small children—were beyond her mother. But Manjula remembers how, at night, in their small bed, her mother would tell her fairytales, of slaying saber-toothed cats, making mammoths bend the knee, goading dodos into flight, all to defend her daughter from the darkness that pressed up against the windows.

#

The one time in the school year that boys are allowed to enter the all-girls building is during the graduation ceremony. The girls have already filed in two by two, hands linked as neatly as the beribboned braids that adhere to their starched white backs. When the boys arrive, they assault the senses, first with their noise and then with the stench. Manjula's friend whispers that they seem to have let out the zoo. But to Manjula, they look friendly enough. There's a giraffe observing the crowd, turning his long neck this way and that. Pink-faced hippos, their jowls jiggling at some private joke. And there, look, a fawn, with gentle brown eyes and a sloping forehead. Manjula catches his eye and smiles. He grins and bares his teeth, jagged and unexpectedly white.

#

By the time Manjula grows to adulthood, her mother has been gone for over a decade, and it is her brother whom she thinks of as a parent. One of the boyfriends her brother approves of has a mother with a bad back, curved like the fat end of a fishing hook. "Do you love me?" it seems to ask, as she stoops over her son. "Do you love me still? Do you love me more?" When the boyfriend raises his hand against Manjula, she leaves him, despite her brother's scruples. She learns to avoid the men whose mothers bear the curving backs, the stooping shoulders. They do not ask the right questions.

#

On the day her new nephew is born, Manjula goes to visit him. He reminds her of the macaques that torment the visitors at temples—his wizened little face, the coarse hair sprouting from his scalp, the stunted end of the umbilical cord hanging out of his belly. But then the baby opens his eyes to his mother, and a look passes between them, of such pure and complete understanding, that Manjula's very teeth ache with jealousy.

#

Manjula's new boyfriend takes her to an exhibition of ancient art at the museum. She is drawn to a depiction of the king and his sons, training with their weapons in the royal gardens, on mares subdued with silk. Their swords drip with rubies, their daggers are thick with mother-of-pearl. In the background, the palace rises upon row after row of latticed windows. When Manjula comes closer, close enough to smell the oil, she can see the eyes of the queens, caged behind the lattice, darting from side to side within their gilded frame. Unlike the mothers, Manjula is free to leave, but she finds herself captivated, immobilized, like a fly in amber.

#

Manjula offers to watch her nephew while his parents go out to dinner. It is her maiden attempt at babysitting. Afterwards, she says, half-jokingly, that she was afraid for her life. She tells her brother how at any moment, she expected to be bound, gagged, dragged to the IKEA coffee table, and beheaded with the blunt end of a toy helicopter blade. Her brother laughs. "He's a handsome rascal," he says, ruffling the boy's hair. Her sister-in-law stoops over her son, holds him close.

#

At the hospital, they tell Manjula it is time; her twins are upside down, squirming, pressing against her pelvis. Manjula screams and screams as if there is something savage within her, struggling to get free. The nurse holds her hand, and Manjula tries to hold her breath. Then her body takes over, and Manjula can no longer resist her boys. They begin to eat her alive from the inside.

.

Lavanya Vasudevan lives in the Seattle area. She's had stories in Lost Balloon, Pidgeonholes, Paper Darts and others.

Read her postcard.

Detail of art on main page by Mariana Motoko.





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