Season of Silence

Mandira Pattnaik 

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Under the cloudy shadows mocking a deeply furrowed farmland, flies a kite feeble against the openness, yellow-and-maroon upon azure, hoping to soar over pockmarked walls and ruined island fortresses, in the kingdom of hawks and seagulls, the power of wind on the scrap of colored paper, complete in itself when you tug at the strings and I hold the bridle, the silence rushing in from all sides, even as I know how you could fail, tear, let it break, and you know how I am prone to be at the end of the rope, finished, too exhausted to keep it going, and yet we hope, we can only hope, that it didn’t end up in tatters, fraying like detritus on our pointless lives.

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Mandira Pattnaik‘s work appears in IHLR, The Rumpus, The McNeese Review, Penn Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, Contrary, Quarter After Eight, Best Microfiction Anthology (2024) and BSF (2021 & 2024), among others. Mandira is the author of seven collections including “Anatomy of a Storm-Weathered Quaint Townspeople” (2022), “Girls Who Don’t Cry” (2023), “Where We Set Our Easel” (2023) and three others forthcoming in 2024 and 2025. Mandira’s debut novel is under consideration. Visit her at mandirapattnaik.com

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To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.