Flash the Court

Tag: Indirect Dialogue

  • “Compromise” by RR Menon

    “Compromise” by RR Menon

    In the microfiction “Compromise,” RR Menon takes a fresh approach to indirect dialogue. We are given what’s said as well as what’s unsaid, what’s intended as well as what’s unintended. The narrator and her mother are presented as the central figures of the story, but two additional characters lurk in the narrative’s margins, the brother and the matchmaker.  —Court Harler

    The matchmaker to my mother: She needs to compromise but doesn’t exactly say what the compromise is or what kind of compromise. She lets it sit and stale like the laddoo I once had to give up for my brother when there wasn’t enough, its rotund head plucked away from my hands and delivered to my brother’s.

    My mother to me: Get used to it and she doesn’t say what it is as she doles out more chakli for my brother and wipes her oil-slicked hand on her hair. Then she disappears the way the cricket bat from my cupboard did before my last match with the girls’ cricket team. Just emerging in the kitchen, her one hand making the sabzi, the other rolling out rotis before switching to adding tadka. Like Durga ma with many limbs.

    My mother to me: Don’t listen to those Western ladies and she makes a face of swallowing a whole laddoo when she hears the words independent and modern.

    My mother to herself: Western ladies can say what they want. When will she learn she needs to be a good, wholesome gulab jamun to find a good husband, good in-laws.

    My mother to my mirror image: You don’t look like a gulab jamun. Your skin isn’t glossy or sweet-smelling or anything. And you don’t behave like one.

    When the matchmaker brings the rejected marriage proposals, my mother lies crushed and powdered on the sofa, fly-swatting them away.

    That’s when I know what compromise is. Watching the matchmaker and my mother gather the bits of laddoo into a bowl, and shoveling it into the bin.

    RR MENON is a Dubai-based writer. Her work has been published in The Disappointed Housewife, Mythic Picnic, Tiny Molecules, Bending Genres, the Bath Flash Fiction anthology, and elsewhere, and nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. Her middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents, has been published by Fitzroy Books.

    Featured image by Luna Dai, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Water Tower Views” by Liz deBeer

    “Water Tower Views” by Liz deBeer

    In “Water Tower Views,” Liz deBeer captures the intricacies of budding young love—it’s both charming and crude, both bashful and brazen. The reader is given a glimpse of young love’s potential future as well, which grows ever more complicated amid fraught family dynamics. Surveillance and supervision also act as key motifs in this bold flash fiction.  —Court Harler

    Pushing aside homemade floral curtains, I watch neighborhood boys bike toward our street’s dead end, supervised only by the town’s water tower, a silver globe atop long legs, like a giant metallic spider.

    The next morning at the bus stop, they laugh and elbow Billy, mimicking him climbing up the long ladder to the water tower’s top railing, swearing it’s over one hundred fuckin’ feet. How Billy spread apart his legs to pee on the wildflowers below, bellowing, “I can see the whole damn world up here!” They shake their pelvises as if they too are spraying Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans from the heavens. They suck on imaginary cigarettes, blow out phantom smoke puffs, hack from fantasy fumes.

    A few yards away, the other girls and I pretend we aren’t listening, aren’t visualizing a yellow stream watering the wildflower field, aren’t wondering if we could make smoke circles too or if we’d choke-gag-retch at all of it.

    When the bus pulls to the curb, the boys strut down the aisle to sit in back rows, as far from the driver’s view as possible. Sliding into a middle seat, I wonder what else Billy saw from the water tower. Could he see into our houses? Mom yelling at Daddy when he spilled spaghetti on the carpet? Or my older sister smooshed against her boyfriend on the motorcycle Daddy had forbidden her to ride? Or later, Daddy guzzling glasses of Seagram’s Seven and Seven, cursing the goddamn Mets?

    As we bump toward school, I wonder if Billy could see me from my window wishing I were with him, looking out over rooftops, yelling, “I can see too!” Or if he sees me now, thinking of him and the boys.

    LIZ deBEER is a teacher and writer with Project Write Now, a writing cooperative based in New Jersey. Her latest flash has appeared in BULL, Fictive Dream, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres, and others. She has written essays for various journals including Brevity Blog.

    Featured image by Dana Kamp, courtesy of Unsplash.