Photo by Florencia Potter on Unsplash
by Swetha Amit
After Grandma died a week ago, the day after my sixteenth birthday, I walked to the neighborhood bakery for some pumpkin cupcakes. I stood in the long line watching the trees around me change colors and shed their leaves. Everything felt cold and morbid, with Ma and Pa mourning in their rooms, the gust of icy wind, and people in gray coats giving me sympathetic looks. I wondered if it was my tear-stained, blotchy cheeks or my heartache that revealed the unconcealed sorrow in my sunken eyes. At home, I curled up in front of the television, nibbling on the pumpkin cupcakes, letting the voices from the characters in a Netflix series fill the house, which felt empty without Grandma’s sweet voice and the aroma of her baking scents that once wafted from the kitchen and warmed the living room. At night, I heard her whispers through the wind knocking on my window, saw her smiling at me in my dreams, and in the mornings, I groped to figure out the date or day, which felt blurred due to my inability to distinguish between illusions and reality.
Swetha is an MFA Graduate from the University of San Francisco. The author of a memoir, A Turbulent Mind, and three chapbooks. Her words appear in Had, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Cream City Review, and others. A member of the Writers Grotto, her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fiction.
