Husband Stitch
by Nikita Deshpande
Why stop at one? Let the wife wake up as a modified car, souped up with special engines. A roaring, gas-guzzling monster, with cupholders by every window. Let the wife wake up as a modular kitchen. One click, and you unravel a cutting board. One step and the bin opens its mouth, always hungry, always eager for your scraps and peels. A billion slots for you to push your knives into, a billion drawers with its rails and slides permanently greased and waiting. Slick. Let the wife wake up as a fidget cube. Layers upon layers of plastic moulded tight for flipping open and smacking shut, engineered beautifully for your idle pleasure, your torment, your filthy, battering love.
Nikita Deshpande is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter based in Mumbai, India. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Paranoid Tree, Gulmohar Quarterly, The Prose Poem, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, The Hooghly Review and an anthology called The World That Belongs to Us. She won the 2023 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and was awarded a 2015 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship to work on her fiction. She is also the author of a novel called It Must’ve Been Something He Wrote published by Hachette India. Twitter/Instagram: @deepblueruin