Puzzle Rules

By Neema Bipin Avashia

My first grade teacher deemed me cognitively disabled because I could not tie my shoes, hold a pencil, cut with scissors, complete puzzles, could not make my Brown skin white, and for 24 years after being in her class, I avoided all fine-motor tasks, so I typed instead of writing by hand, wore slip-ons instead of sneakers, refused to join the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle because my inability to grasp how the sharp and curving blanks and tabs fit together, felt somehow an indictment of my intellect, a failing I was unable to fix, until I met Laura, who gave me a photo puzzle for my birthday but ended up completing it all by herself while I battled strep throat, who then created a second photo puzzle for our surprise wedding ten years later where each guest got a piece and had to work with others to solve the mystery of why we were all gathered, who taught me the rules of puzzling—find all of the edge pieces and build out the frame, then sort and join the remaining pieces by color or pattern, and then, when doing the most complex parts of the puzzle, choose one piece at a time and hunt the board for the blank space that matches each tab shape—rules I didn’t learn growing up in an immigrant home where no one had time for puzzles, and no one knew the rules, either; thus I seek out puzzles now, let my mind go blank as I work on a color or pattern or corner, savor the tiny buzz of satisfaction that comes when I snap a tab into a blank, when I own the rules.

Neema Avashia is a teacher and writer whose book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, will be published by WVU Press in 2022.

Photo by Neema Avashia.

Nostalgia Becomes Grief

By Liz Enochs

I want to wear corduroy overalls and tops with spaghetti straps, hear dial tones from phones with finger holes, eat gummies that gush in my mouth, drink from glasses of bonneted geese, watch 1990s VHS recordings just for the commercials, play kickball at the church playground where a girl told everyone I was queer, sneak into the sanctuary and watch myself in the Christmas play, eavesdrop on my conversations with the only Black girl in children’s church, see the poster I hid under my bed so the Hansons wouldn’t become a “graven image” on my wall, visit my hometown before the trailer park became a shopping center, before my first boss became my sexual harasser, before my grandparents were buried — I want to hold the dog my dad shot in the woods because we couldn’t afford the vet, run from boys who made me laugh before they became men who made me cry, buy orange ice cream from a truck and stroll dirt roads with girls who became people I don’t talk to anymore, walk out of rooms where adults told me how not to get raped — but more than all of that, I want to know how and why and when nostalgia becomes grief.

Liz Enochs is a writer from southeast Missouri — more often than not, you’ll find her in the woods.

Art by Ellie Ladyman, an acrylic and watercolor painter who finds inspiration in being outdoors and spending time with family.

Pigeons

By Varun U. Shetty

You’re in Mumbai riding on the back of your friend's bike, and you notice the neighborhood stray dog trying to swallow a bird, its wing sticking out of its slobbering mouth, so you rescue the wet, shocked bird, take it to a quiet corner in the building compound; you feed it and give it water, but it doesn't move much other than a few steps, and no one in the building really cares about a broken pigeon but you, and that makes you wonder why people call them rats with wings, probably because they don't know that pigeons are the closest they'll ever get to knowing living dinosaurs, probably because they have forgotten that pigeons delivered messages for thousands of years, that these birds can find their home from hundreds of miles away while you are 8000 miles from where you were born, wondering if you know where you will fly to, at the end of your life, but still you are in disbelief that people are not impressed by the ultraviolet fluorescent scarves accenting their gray coats, the elegance in their stance, or how they don't see the brilliance in their anxious take-offs and stylish landings--your mind wanders and you don't remember if it was a single day or several, but you remember that the pigeon disappeared one day, that you and your friend were convinced that it was either that evil cat, or the grumpy gardener, and now you remember the other blind pigeon you tried to save but failed--you were confident that this time, it was that damn cat; and here come the others you have failed, like the love birds you killed unintentionally, or the Brahmini kite that fell out of the sky due to a heat stroke and died later, in your home, or that kitten on the side of the street with a deformed pelvis, or that puppy run over by a car, its head split open, and you realize that pigeons are not only a symbol of your personal failure to save animals but also the world's failure to see beauty.

Varun U. Shetty is a writer and intensivist from Mumbai, currently living in Shaker Hts., OH, whose work has appeared in The Wire, Olney Magazine, Literary Cleveland’s Breaking the Silence, Voices From the Edge online anthologies, The Bangalore Review, and Goa Today.

Photo by Jason Thayer, who found this pigeon shot dead, like seven or eight years ago when he was living in Chicago.