ABHA IYENGAR started writing staid, and is now going experimental. Life is the stuff of tales. She has been published in Artemis, Gowanus, and Kota Press among others.

                                                             tunnel vision


“I love you,” she said.

She lay there on the bed, dressed to meet the groom-to-be.

Her eyes were wide open; her red lips a slash across her face. The smile did not reach her eyes, which looked vacant. Dead.

If you looked close enough.

He looked close enough, looking down as he was on her, lying there on the bed.

Didn’t it strike him as funny that she, a young girl of eighteen, should be lying down and receiving him in the bedroom?

Perhaps it was the done thing after all.

“I love you, too,” he said. He was meeting her for the first time.

The meeting had been arranged by the respective parents.

Her parents, looking on, hiding their anxiety, smiled.

“They love each other.” They nodded to each other. This was indeed a blessed union.

She would soon forget her previous lover, her depression would disappear, marriage was ‘the solution’.

He left.

She got out of bed. She would dance throughout the night. The drugs would do the rest.

A painted rag doll.

I sobbed quietly.

My beautiful sister. Slithering in a dark tunnel not of her making.

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© 2003 Abha Iyengar