Dinner parties

January 2025 | fiction

She lived to host dinner parties. It was a need, a compulsion, to fulfill it she would look for the most absurd reasons. Like the time she bought a purse and messaged our group: Guess what it’s dinner party time. I just bought a purse. Or when she had a fight with her parents over not hurrying to marry a nice boy and having his babies before her biological clock froze. Then there was one where her blind date stood her up. Soon, the reason to hold dinner parties gained as much popularity as the dinner party itself. Her friends couldn’t fault her since her hostessing skills were flawless. She was an extraordinary cook with a knack for chopping her feelings and emotions into itty-bitty pieces and adding them to her dishes. She preferred the food to tell us stories and hold all the intimate conversations while she  laughed, twirled her hair, and talked about anything and everything except what she felt

Like when the guy she thought was the one broke up with her, she held a dinner party and made her version of Cassata, a three-layered ice cream on a sponge cake, and served it with a sprinkling of pistachios. With every spoon we took of this dainty ice cream, we tasted her thoughts of that guy, her love, her heartbreak forming a bitter-sweet taste in our mouths, stirring our own uncomfortable memories of having loved and lost. We looked at her, imploring her to talk, to tell us what she felt but she kept pushing the Cassata in front of us. That night, we left feeling betrayed by love, and with a deep unsettling fear of layered ice cream cakes.

And the time her cat died, she had made Rogan Josh.  That dinner party, with candles lighting up the room instead of electricity, as we mopped up the soft naan bread with velvety Rogan Josh sauce wrapped around meat pieces tender as a child’s kiss, we digested her sadness. We could see her dicing onion crying, pretending her tears were onion tears and nothing else. Her heart was raw, her eyes swollen, and she smiled and chatted while shadows danced on her face. By then we stopped asking her to talk while we wrestled with a million conversations within us.

Happiness also occasionally found a seat at her dinner parties like when she passed her driving test after four attempts, and she made bitter gourd curry that tasted like a mother’s hug. We remembered when our mothers stroked our hair and cheeks and rocked us with milky breaths to sleep. With every dinner party we partook in, we felt, we were swallowing a part of her soul, her memory, her being; our souls blending into hers. When, at long last, we realized we needed these dinner parties more than she needed them.

Roopa Menon

Roopa lives in Dubai, U.A.E. but was raised in Kochi, India where swatting mosquitoes at dusk is considered a life skill, to be honed and perfected. Some of her short stories have been published in Corium magazine, Nunum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, Crow & Cross Keys, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best of Microfiction. Her debut middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents, has been published by Fitzroy Books. She tweets erratically @RoopaMenon1

Local Boys

January 2025 | fiction

In brown and grey demob suits, stoked up well with Woodbines, the three of them, from the same regiment, were thrown up cheek-by-hip on the platform: Tim, Spence, the younger David. They were packed into a wooden-slat-seat train and Spence, a chunky pugilist of a man, the veteran of bar room scraps, now weathering twenty-six, knew, like the other two, that hostilities were over, that the lights were out at last on the theatres of war.

The theatre was part of home for lanky Tim. For five, six years pre-war, he’d done amdram. He had the wavy hair, indeed the coaxing smile of a film star, so in the local Little Theatre, he could charm the ladies, court the audiences, bask in the warm reviews. But for six years nearly (Tim was thirty-two in a fortnight’s time), he had found, in conflict and in barrack room, you got to see the truth of fellow men, naked and in the raw. He was thinking rather differently now, of men and audiences and acting and affection. Post-war things would be difficult for him and only finally, decades on, would he reach a personal peace.

Spencer had married back in ’41, and yes, he was looking forward to going back to Lily. There was the physical part, of course, the regularity, and in the years that followed he would settle, despite the criss-cross and the alleyways of love, for what was more or less OK. He’d think of her, always, as ‘the Missus’, just as he’d think of ‘the boy’ and ‘the girl’. And decades on, when the cancer struck, he would cope and care for Lily with a dour devotion.

David was bound to think, on that journey home, of the breathless Rachel, the schoolgirl daughter of his mother’s friend. She’d been there at their house, on each of his leaves, and he knew full well she loved him blatantly. Everything in him, of manhood, pride and celebration, yearned for her. Yet somehow now, post-war, aged twenty-two, she not quite seventeen, he would keep feeling the gulf between all he’d seen, the nauseous blood, the gristle exposed, and the world of the child. So they would circle each other for several tremulous months, before in time they panicked and married others.

Each married a shit. Only after many, many years, after the bitterness, the blows, the pettiness, were they free, their every emotion rising with a rush.

In 1995, the celebrations marked the end of the war, and the following golden peace.  None of the boys attended. Spencer said, ‘I’m just glad I came back and I think of the boys who didn’t’. He stayed in playing rummy with Lily (recovered years ago but frail). Tim and his partner Sebastian drank their Merlot in their favourite London wine bar. David and Rachel went in a rural morning for their walk in the Teifi marshes, saw the radiance of the kingfisher, felt the wetlands’ wealth and depth.

Robert Nisbet

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh writer whose work has been widely published in the USA. Burningword Literary Journal and three other magazines have nominated him for a Pushcart.