SJ Sindu

When I was nine I wanted a short-sleeved button-down shirt. Amma refused to buy one from the boys’ section, pushed me instead toward the pinks and butterflies in the girls’, so I told her I needed one for a school play. I wore it open when I biked down hills, the wind slipping its fingers through the loose weave, cooling my sweat through my tank top. My best friend Nisha told me I’d make a cute boy, and her words squeezed something deep inside my bones, pried loose the skin between my legs. Pin pricks. Needles. My first lie.

Kris spends his nights trying to write his own greetings and staring at the cards framed over his desk, the few he got published when he first left engineering and started in this business. I spend my nights drawing commissions for horny suburban fanboys with money to waste—too-thin elves facing off against tentacled monsters, custom Sailor Scouts, coy anime girls frolicking at the beach, well-endowed geishas undressing in dimly-lit rooms.

Laila Aunty is the woman that my father married after he left Amma.