2.84 Ounces
Leave a commentSeptember 23, 2022 by The Citron Review
by Kavi Yaga
A woman in front of me at the grocery check-out line told me she had given birth to her own uterus.
She claimed she was walking in the cornfields when the uterus was expulsed. Her uterus was stringy, blood-drenched, needy. It lay in the mud making grunting, uterus sounds.
She said she couldn’t walk so she crawled towards the road. The uterus followed her, waving its fallopian tubes in the air like a sick baby. They reached the road and lay exhausted on the sidewalk, visible to all and to the sky. A grey hatchback came to a stop beside them. Hundreds of people with masks got down from the car.
What did they look like? I asked her.
She said their masks looked like anybody’s face.
The masked people examined her uterus with their walking sticks. They picked it up, put it in a black bag and drove away. She found her car and went home.
What did you when you got home? I asked.
She said she weighed herself. She had lost exactly 2.84 ounces.
I asked her if it included the loss of blood, but her turn came up at the grocery line and she walked away.
Kavi Yaga lives in Hyderabad, India. Her work has appeared in The Hindu, The Bombay Review, Out of Print, Killing the Buddha, etc. Her travel memoir, Walking in Clouds, was published in 2018 by HarperCollins, India. Her story, “You Can Be More” was runner-up for the 2021 Calvino Prize for Speculative Fiction. She is working on a novel. Previously, she was a software engineer in Chicago and a developmental economist in South India.
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