How to Wear Your Eyes on Your Wedding
“Now It’s the Women’s Turn” by Jay Daugherty
Line your eyes with hands like magician’s wand, black kohl, make them whirlpools, not arrow-spewing stares, between dark and light, not bright, never moon, nor boot-shine, not coy, never bold, not meeting the groom’s glance, nor his mother’s.
Breathe, breathe, breathe — not with the hurt of when they dolled you, not with the pain of when your brother Anees drowned and the floodwaters didn’t care, nor with the passion when Akash touched you, nor like wilting chrysanthemums in his garden, not the sigh of your father, nor the resignation of your mother when they raised you to the wedding podium, a sacrificial altar with dainty stick-on glitter.
Color the eyelids, try mauve and remove, try carmine and rub off, brush it golden, but not like gold sunshine, not the queen, not the honeybee’s wings, nor the gold they took loans to put around your neck in floral-chains.
Close, then open, not slow, not fast, not like flapping wings, nor like iron-shutters, nor spread them like Kashmiri carpet on which Jignesh rolled away, telling you how the frontier beckoned him, how he saw himself in military fatigues, machine-gun in hand, and you might matter, you may not.
Make your eyelashes stand on end — not like thorns, nor like spiked concertina wires, not like the scythe, nor like rope you lowered so Madhav could escape while your father banged on your door.
Blink like cattle, not like fairy lights, not like tempests curling within, nor like avalanche you’re getting crushed under, nor like your mother and sisters heaving around you.
Raise your eyes, lower, wear them just right, precise, careful not to lock them to those of the man in sherwani, your groom, standing with a broad garland in hand, waiting to tie you for life, not for his desire, never for your love, because magic happens, if you look long and hard, and you know it never lasts.
About the Author
Mandira Pattnaik is an Indian fiction writer, poet, editor and columnist. Her flash fiction has been longlisted in Wigleaf Top 50 (2022), included in Best Small Fictions Anthology (2021), RetreatWest Ten Year Anthology (2022), NFFD UK, NFFD NZ, Alt Current Speculative Parenting Anthology (2022) and others. Mandira's work appears in The Penn Review, Contrary, Watershed Review, The McNeese Review, Passages North among about 200 other places, and is forthcoming in Quarterly West, AAWW and Cleaver. She writes columns for Reckon Review, is the columnist and editor, trampset, and is the Contributing Editor of Vestal Review. Author website: mandirapattnaik.com and on Twitter: @MandiraPattnaik
about the artist
Jay Daugherty: After a disaffected adolescence, Jay Daugherty (b.1985) was homeless until he discovered Tibetan Buddhism. Since then he has studied Fine Arts at Purdue University, Art History at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, and Tibetan & Himalayan Studies at the University of Oxford. He's also studied the Tibetan language in Kathmandu, Nepal and art history at the University of Washington in Seattle. Inspired by philosophies of perception, psychology, and the phenomenology of pictorial space, his distinct abstract surrealist style features biomorphic figures and architectural structures within mysterious dreamlike landscapes.