By Kushal Poddar
The app-cab driver waits outside the inn with an eye on his watch, old fashioned, fastened to his thinning wrist. Though he knows it’s silly, he thinks his arms are wooden—in monsoon season, they swell and come winter they shrivel.
The stranger he will ferry to the airport urged him to wait at the curb while she ran upstairs, past the hotel’s lobby, past the rickety bellhop, to make love with another stranger she’d met, because this is a strange city.
Yonder, from the sea, return the fishermen with the booty of silver fish. Gills open and shut, shut and open. The fish breathe in and breathe out for the last time as the stranger sprawls wide and lets the other stranger enter into her. The linens are white, and the lovers surrounded by blue walls—narrow, because everything in this town is narrow except the tourists. They are wide and liberal. They arrive from every sphere and every stratum of life in every possible form.
When she comes down, the app-cab driver takes his stranger to the airport. The journey is silent although he keeps his radio on, and the music is light. He keeps thinking about the fish—gills opening and shutting, breathing in and out.
At the gate marked ‘Departures’ he drops her off, collects his fare, then calls his wife. “What’s for dinner, sweetie?”
She says, “Fish.”
A poet and a father, Kushal Poddar, edited the magazine, Words Surfacing, authored seven volumes of poetry including The Circus Came To My Island, A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Eternity Restoration Project:Selected and New Poems, and Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse: A Prequel. Find and follow him on Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter.