Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This tight, carefully crafted piece of flash fiction depicts violence in an oblique but powerful way, committed to the lion and its transgressions. In a masterful move at the end, we see what has been happening in the family all along.
Listen to Bhattacharya read the story:
Lion
My mother kept in the house, as pets, not only smaller feral and wolfish creatures and cats but also a large full-grown lion. She wouldn’t hear of sending the lion away. “He’s tamed,” she said. “He won’t hurt anyone.”
“It’s a ticking bomb,” I said. “An animal acts on instinct, and you can never predict what it might do if aroused or provoked.” She wouldn’t hear a word. I said it had to be either me or the lion in the house. She was unmoved. I couldn’t fathom it.
The lion proved dangerous, as I knew he would. One night he ate one of the cats. The dead darling’s eyes, milky in its torn-off head in the upstairs hallway, pressed terrible charges. My mother’s eyes flash flooded.
“Send him away now,” I said.
“Where will he go?” she asked.
“Will you worry about that when he kills me or you?” I asked.
She only cried more.
The killings went on. The lion had become addicted to fresh blood. It was the paper delivery boy next. My mother was charged with murder for illegally harboring a grown lion in the house. She went to jail; the lion went away in a big black van. “You destroyed your own life, and maybe mine, and now you’re going to jail for an animal that couldn’t help acting like one,” I told her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought he’d get old, loose his teeth and cravings, and die in his sleep.”
When I woke up, I understood. The lion was my mother’s one true love. The lion was the town drunk, my father, roaring back home at night.
Nandini Bhattacharya is a writer, professor of English, public speaker, reviewer, and blogger whose first novel is Love’s Garden (Aubade Publishing, 2020). Shorter work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, River Styx, The Rumpus, ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, Another Chicago Magazine, Folio Literary Journal, Notre Dame Review, and more. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers Workshop and VONA, and had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale. Her second novel, Something of Me in You, is agented, and she is at work on two other novels about mysterious families and the mystery of family.
