Month: October 2025

I’ve always wondered, Papa—would you be this father if your mother had loved you?

*

I was visiting home after a year. This is how my father and I met, for days or a few weeks at a stretch since I left home for college, which was precisely seven days after my mother’s passing.

Every time we meet, it feels like we are starting over. We talk in pauses, short responses, and fillers, carefully treading around topics like Ma, my career plans, his post-retirement plans, and whether I’m seeing someone.

The silence had grown heavier in our small, overstuffed flat.

My father’s mother (an evil witch, as my mother called her) was coming to stay over.

She had to get some tests done for her ear in the city, my father told me from the kitchen, unwilling to meet my gaze or see my reaction.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine why. My father’s siblings couldn’t be bothered to make these efforts, even though she lived with them and gave them all her love—and everything else she had, including my mother’s gold jewelry, which she took soon after my parents got married.

The next day, I found him obsessively dusting the house.

He didn’t ask me about my investments, but instead asked what snacks I liked to take back with me. He acted like the boys I’d been on dates with, consulting invisible mental index cards.

He has been a good father—he sent me to an expensive school he barely could afford, never commented on my short clothes, bought me a computer in fifth grade before anyone else had one, proudly displayed my silly awards around the house, and occasionally shared stories from his village childhood—stories I wished were more about him than others, but I still cherished them.

He then began wiping the curtain rods in the drawing room. When he asked me about lunch, I lied about meeting a friend.

He didn’t pester me, no follow-up questions either. He wasn’t expecting me to greet his mother, for all I knew, he wouldn’t mind if I abruptly went back on the next flight.

I didn’t know whether to feel grateful for his understanding or betrayed that he sought no support from me.

I wondered if I was wrong in not opposing this. I couldn’t. I didn’t have that power over him anymore. I wasn’t a child who could throw fits. He wanted this familial duty so he could feel like a son. He lacked the lens to see it any other way.

I despised him for having no self-respect. For giving away his hard-earned money after a single phone call from her. For weeping and calling “Ma, Ma…” over and over when he was drunk. All this for a mother who didn’t care enough to visit him after his heart surgery. Who sat laughing over snacks at his wife’s funeral, and said nothing to her grieving granddaughter.

I had not seen him cry once for my mother.

Even when he reached for my phone to explain directions to the cab driver, he didn’t meet my gaze. When I stepped out, he didn’t say bye—just that the cab would be parked outside the block.

When I returned in seconds for my earphones, I saw him lying back on the sofa chair, the wet cloth dropped on his side, staring outside the balcony, as if he had let himself fall back and relax with me gone. He looked like he could finally think. For a moment, I had the urge to shake him out of it, but instead, I turned away and left.

---

Garima Chhikara is a fiction writer from Bangalore, India. Her stories explore themes of emotional depth and personal transformation. Her work appears or is upcoming in Forge Literary, Hobart, La Piccioletta Barca, and Halfway Down the Stairs. Find her at garimachhikara.com.

Each day, six classes: Numbers, Classifications, Letters, Names, Functions, and Deep Listening. All our parents wanted a nontraditional education or were otherwise indifferent and let us fall into the strange pedagogy, the same way they let their cigarettes burn out in stolen hotel ashtrays.

But we learned.

Numbers taught us how to steal. How to make things add up even when they didn’t. Eve pawned calculators from the storage closet. Nelly bashed the vending machine until it spit out enough quarters to buy us all lipstick—we wore Neon Orchid. Jessie coaxed a few sympathy dollars out of her father when she saw him on weekends. I took the remainders and invested, my mind toward the future.

We were made to understand the classifications into which we might fit. Keynesian. Figment. Daemon. Gas station attendant.

Jessie loved Letters. Calligraphy in bathroom stalls, on fogged windows, or traced out on my bare shoulders. Once, she set fire to the school’s front lawn—a series of scorched symbols only Nelly could decipher. It’s a curse, she said. Eve and I called it a love letter. It looked like this: ∆≈∆.

Eve was nameless until her fifth year. Her parents disagreed on a name until their disagreement segued into a kind of patience. They opted to wait for the right name to arrive. Nominal determinism was in vogue, and no parents, even ours—lazy, abstracted, churlish—could risk the wrong name. Eventually, Eve’s great aunt died and her name became available and irrefutable. But more than ten years later, she’d still refer to herself as namelessness. When Eve and I first kissed, she said I kissed the nameless part of her. When Nelly gashed a spiral into Eve’s knee with a fountain pen, Eve said it was the nameless part of her that bled. Jessie wrote letters addressed to no one, and Eve read them all. The class though, it didn’t teach us anything we didn’t already know.

Here’s an example of a function: Me⇒  Eve⇒  Nelly⇒  Jessie⇒  Eve⇒  Jessie⇒   f(X). And another function might be: Our parents⇒  the school⇒  my memory⇒  bruises⇒  f(neon orchid). I barely passed.

Imagine us on the carpeted floor of the auditorium, arranged in the shape of a plus-sign, our four faces glinting with sweat, our half-tamed acne, fingernails ragged and trembling. To listen deeply—we were instructed—was to hear from outside of yourself. Like the sea in a conch shell or a dopplering siren ricocheting through subsidized apartments. I wanted to hear through Nelly, because she’d disappeared during our last semester, and we heard from our parents that she’d married a cowboy in Montana. We knew it wasn’t true. She’d taken the remainder and ran. What could she hear, out there in the future?

When they called her name at graduation, Nelly did not appear. Eve cried on my shoulder; Jessie flicked a match. I only remember the applause, not the faces of our parents or what happened after.

---

Vincent James Perrone is a writer from Detroit. He’s the author of the poetry collection Starving Romantic and a contributor to the experimental fiction anthology Collected Voices in the Expanded Field. His recent and forthcoming work can be found in Split Lip, The Los Angeles Review, Action Spectacle, and Pithead Chapel. Vincent is currently based in Charlottesville, VA, where he is pursuing an MFA at the University of Virginia.