Ok, so it’s technically a little late to be called Friday Fiction, but if you’ll forgive me a few hours, here’s the start of my next writing project:
She woke to the sound of house geckos meeting on the top of her mosquito net. They looked down on her with their beady eyes and waved their thin hooked claws as they scrabbled across the netting; the morning light illuminated them to be nearly translucent. Moushumi carefully shook the net, causing them to scatter towards the walls at a surprising speed. One, two, three, four dust-colored bodies fled the orange-tinted net, making their panicked ticking sound as they went. Moushumi rolled over, fighting hard not to greet the day.
Her entire trip to the village had been characterized by animals. A giant corner-frog with sleepy half-shut eyes greeted her every morning in the bathroom as she squatted down to pee. Chickens squabbled over grain in the courtyard and ran circles around the haggard-looking dog that panted in the heat, her head constantly bowed in such a way that she could never be mistaken as a guard dog. The old male goat had taken a liking to her and followed her around as she took plates of rice from the kitchen to the dining room, bleating so its kids would nuzzle up beside her like cats. She preferred these animals to the legions of people who came to see her in the afternoon. They said little, instead watching her with wide-eyed stares and giggling over her foreign accent. She would turn away from them, a peacock amidst pigeons, and hide away in her corner room, turning the fan on high and reading for hours on end until the next mealtime. Once she took a walk down to the riverside by herself, but that was discouraged by her cousins’ worried questions about where she had gone and whether she wanted someone to go with her next time. The American in her was frustrated by the constant attention, the need to have an escort just to walk amongst some fruit trees, so she holed up instead, forgoing the light of day for some introspection.
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