Happy Birthday
Myra pushes the grocery cart past her husband’s favorite crucifers, cabbage and kale, glowing like emeralds. She propels past a halved pomegranate with insides spilling out like winking rubies—he considered them the only healthy fruit. She adds firm pressure when the wobbly wheel tilts left at the topaz of butternut squash, strides beyond the hum and chill of the refrigerated and freezer sections, run-walks toward the bakery in the back corner where she requests the food artist to swirl a pink and white message on a 24-inch chocolate cake: Happy Birthday to Me.
In the party supplies store, she ignores the streamers in amethyst, jade, and coral. Making a left, she stomps away from the rows of cheery greeting card shelves beaming printed sentiments her husband called phony—he didn’t believe in acknowledging mass-produced emotions. He didn’t hand- create a birthday message for her either. At the end of the aisle, Myra finds the plump woman who huffs, filling balloons as if stuffing them with her breath. The woman’s face is a dark garnet when she finishes Myra’s order: a bouquet of twenty-four.
The line at the pizzeria snakes past the front door. Myra waits for over an hour, blowing into her cold hands, stamp-stamping her feet and wiggling her toes inside her sneakers to keep them from going numb. Flavors tickle her nostrils and set off a yearning in her tongue. Her husband detested the onyx of olives and the pearly smoothness of mozzarella, assumed she must dislike them too. She ponders the list of toppings on the menu board, piles on her favorites: garlic, bell peppers, mushrooms, pineapple, extra-extra olives, extra-extra cheese.
At home, she drapes the never-used, opal-shaded linen—grand-aunt’s gift for her wedding—on the table and arranges the balloons as a centerpiece. She slices the cake and the pizza in geometric patterns, orders Alexa to play birthday music on high volume. Then, she fetches the urn with her husband’s ashes and situates the large decorative container on the table, right in front of his chair. As if for a ceremony, she retrieves a pin, and POP-POP-POPs the balloons. She serves herself a slice of cake, smashes it with her fork. Lifting the urn’s lid, she empties her decadent slice into the container. Twenty-four pieces follow: one for every year of marriage without a birthday celebration.
Hirsute
There’s a letter from the school. A letter I don’t open.
Another severance. Another letting go. The note will mention budgets and cost cutting, the real message couched in what is unsaid, folded and tucked under the typed words.
I imagine the school board meeting in the conference room, heads nodding as the principal with the egg-bald pate holds court. She’s a monster, he says. A hairy monster. With hair not just on her head, but on her arms, on her knuckles, on her wrists, on her neck, on her shoulders.
He says this without seeing the copious tufts under my clothes or the clumps growing on my chest, back, and abdomen. He says this without touching the stubble on my itchy chin, the sprouts that spike by 4:00 p.m. on weekdays and grow into a deep dark shadow over the weekends.
My internal radar is braced for insidious reactions. When a recalcitrant strand pokes out from under my collar, I catch the disgusted wrinkle of noses, the shock-widened eyes, the winding, looping circle of thoughts, and I hear people whisper. “Look at her, look at her, shhh . . . not so loud, slant your gaze, just flick your eyes over her face.”
Of course, the curious little children I teach asked direct questions about the hair—for three days. Now Shira, Donny, Marco, and thin little Nina who goes in and out of hospital, ask questions about kangaroos in Australia, elephants in Africa, llamas in South America.
Sometimes I become the creature people think I am. Sometimes I let the hair grow, become an animal that growls and paces in her den, only to give up, to lop, to shave, to wax, to tweeze. Just as my mother did for me as a young girl, damning this accident of biology, the two of us hiding in the bathroom, fighting the incessant shame. Over and over, every morning, every night, wrestling with Mother Nature’s curse, and losing. Every single time.
Five schools sent letters, the unsaid words falling like blows. Five schools to whom I did not respond.
I peel open the envelope from the sixth, ignore the typed sheet.
Locating my plastic bag of saved hair, I stuff fistfuls into the cover, seal.
In big, bold letters, I inscribe across the top with a red pen: Returned to Sender.
Sudha Balagopal’s recent fiction appears in Matchbook, Smokelong Quar-terly, Fictive Dream and Split Lip Magazine among other journals. She is the author of a novel, A New Dawn. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions, will appear in Best Microfiction 2021 and is listed in the Wigleaf Top 50. More at www.sudhabalagopal.com
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