By Bacopa Literary Review 2024 Flash Fiction Honorable Mention Mandira Pattnaik
I think it is easy to imagine violence these days, tougher to forecast lasting peace and general contentment in life. “Revolver Rita First Look”, my piece that secured an Honorable Mention in Bacopa Literary Review’s 2024 Contest in the Flash Fiction category, opens with such a theme. Latching onto the reader with immediacy and intensity, it shows a mother and her two daughters enacting a turbulent scene:
Our mother’s 22 caliber is slung at her waist. She shoots at random, the revolver in axis to the forearm, index finger at the trigger. We’re the showgirls who hide, emerge from behind faux velvet curtains when the shots go bang-bang-bang out loud and there are screams, glass shattering and brassware flung from one end of the room to another. We meet the audience — there are none, except a part of our crumbling ceiling fallen on the floor, taking down with it an enormous dusty spider’s web and dead insects.
The fun part is whether this scene would be an enactment or for real—I wasn’t sure at the outset. I was stuck with this dilemma for a while when I was writing this story. It was clear to me that the once-wealthy family (they had glass and brassware) had now slid into poverty, and the choice of violence as an emotional outlet was not hard to extrapolate. As a person from the global south, around me, I see this sort of newly jobless, recently disadvantaged people, and I’ve felt their pain. To be historically disadvantaged is one thing, to have your livelihood taken away bit by bit and your life diminished over a period of time, quite another. But whether such a family would really shoot each other in a moment of extreme frustration and fatigue, was a rare, though historically possible, outcome. In the end, I opted for the enactment, balancing the probable violence-venting with the plight of the suddenly out-of-work actress mother.
The resolution of this short piece posed another challenge. I honestly didn’t know what or how it should be done. In my mind, the situation is irresolvable. I don’t think we, as a society, know how hunger, homelessness or joblessness should end, do we? I think that is where fiction comes handy—I had the tool of surrealism—and the family had an escape route that real life wouldn’t allow them.
About the contributor: Mandira Pattnaik is a former contributor to Bacopa Literary Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in IHLR, Emerson Review, The Rumpus and SAND Journal, among others. Visit her at mandirapattnaik.com.
