GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24 

RABIA KAPOOR

‘The Perils of Sleeping on Your Back’

I SLEPT WITH MY MOUTH OPEN. I know I did because 1. My throat was always dry and aching in the morning. 2. There was a ghost that lived on my tongue. It slipped into my mouth at night, then it drowned in my dreams.

We met for the first time on the beach. It took the shape of a young boy and built a sand castle. There were arches and turrets and it had dug out little windows with its small hands. The tide came in, lunging at the castle, taking chunks out of it before it receded. I watched the sea, the swell of it, the waves that grew upwards slowly and let me take in their terrifying size before they crashed on the shore. Then I looked for the boy and he was gone. I felt his hand brush against my leg, submerged in the water as the sea took over all the sand. Try as I did to hold on to the boy’s arm and pull him out, he slipped through my fingers as ghosts are known to do. I woke up in a cold sweat, something hard and dry stuck in my throat.

It came to me many times in its preferred form of a little boy. He took me to mine fields, to buildings on fire, dark streets riddled with killers, and I failed to save him every time. Eventually, he decided he liked to die on the beach best, so we went there most nights. His laughter swept through the passages of my brain, and sand stuck to the curve of my skull. The sun felt warm against my eyelids, squeezed shut. The ending was always the same, the sea moved towards us, monstrous and punctual, and pulled him in. His face would be smiling before he went under, and when it reappeared for a moment, his mouth would hang open, ugly in its horror, and his eyes fixed on me, expectant. I tried to swim to him but my limbs would be impossibly heavy and slow under water. The waves would push me back, crashing behind me like they were falling apart with laughter. I’d wake up, my tongue heavy in my mouth, and I started to associate the taste of my morning breath with grief.

Time moved like sludge when I was awake. I worked in a shoe shop in the mall, sat by the till under white lights that punched my eyes repeatedly for five-to-seven hours and made my whole body feel like tender meat by the time I left. I was exhausted by my nightly failures and angry at the ghost that was a stranger to me but still succeeded in toying with my capacity for loss. When my sister called I answered unwillingly. She told me her marriage might be ending. I told her to look on the bright side. ‘Right,’ she said, and made an excuse to hang up. What a waste of energy.

I walked home in the rain one night, each drop sharp like a bite from a bed bug. I wrapped my arms around my chest and carried myself like a child in my own arms. Dead weight. I thought of the boy’s face, burned as it was into my brain, and I hated him. ‘You’re bringing me down!’ I shouted after him that night, as he ran into the sea and swam and swam until he sank. The sound of his laughter bounced off the domed sky of my sleep. He never heard me. My voice evaporated on my tongue and when I howled at the hungry sea it looked like the sound of crashing waves and drowning boys was spilling out of my mouth.

I fell asleep at work. I was staring at the ceiling, at one particularly vicious light fixture. It looked back at me sharply and I felt like my face were boiling. When I blinked the light stuck to the inside of my eyelid. I liked the burning feeling, and I settled into it, pressed up against the pain, and dozed. My manager shook my shoulder. She told me I had to stop doing that on my shifts or I’d be serious trouble.

‘There’s a ghost in my mouth and he keeps dying in my dreams,’ I told her, my voice hoarse.

‘Stop sleeping on your back,’ she said, and straightened a shoebox on the shelf next to me.

I bought a cheap bottle of wine and drank it all on an empty stomach. Maybe the wine would blot the dreams out. Maybe the hangover would would cloud the fictitious grief. But I threw up before I fell asleep, and when I lay on my side in bed, my throat felt scratched up when I swallowed. I felt so sorry for myself. I hoped I’d be the one to drown that night.

He wobbled onto the shore, his hair wet from the ocean and flat against his forehead. He smiled when he saw me, and ran to where I was sitting on the sand, hugging my knees to my chest. He kissed my cheek and I grabbed his arms.

We took each other in in shock. I felt him fleshy and solid in my hands for the first time. My lips were dry and when I ran my tongue over them I tasted salt. ‘Please stop dying. You’re much heavier than you look,’ I said.

He looked at me with big, frightened eyes, and started to turn cold in my hands.

‘I think you’re giving me a throat infection,’ I went on. ‘I’m not the one that’s going to save you.’

I woke up before the sun had risen, with dried tracks of salt water on my cheeks. But my throat didn’t hurt, and my mouth wasn’t dry. I fell back asleep and felt fine.

At work, my manager smiled at me, and told me I looked better. Then the bags under my eyes improved. I could eat and drink without wincing. Every now and then I managed a smile at a customer. I called my sister and I told her I missed her, that she should visit, and she did. She brought her son along, a ten year old with light hair and small eyes. He didn’t look at me when they arrived, and I was relieved. My sister told me about her divorce, crying softly over the cup of tea I made her. I’d left the bag in too long and the tea was too strong, but my sister held it in both her hands politely, and didn’t drink. ‘I’m relieved,’ she said. ‘But it’s lonely on your own.’

‘You’re not on your own,’ I told her, thinking of her son who had locked himself in the study.

‘Right,’ she said, and looked around my bare living room.

I took them to the river. I didn’t know what else to do, and it was warm enough that day. My sister’s son got into the water first, curling into a ball and launching himself off the old dock. ‘Careful,’ my sister called half-heartedly, rubbing sun cream onto her arms. It didn’t absorb into her skin and made her look waxy. She sat on the grass like candle that had just been lit.

We’d bought grapes and I put one in my mouth, feeling its perfect round shape in my mouth. When I was little I wanted to swallow them without chewing so I could feel it slipping down through me and experience the smoothness of my throat. I bit into the grape and my mouth filled with its sweetness.

We watched my sister’s son splashing in the water. He was a poor swimmer, but he told his mother to watch him dive anyway. He disappeared under the surface of the dark river, and for the moment that he was out of sight I imagined the water stilling above his head forever. Then he broke through its surface and came out gleaming in the afternoon light. He spat water out of his mouth like a fountain towards the sun, and it fell back on his face. He laughed, wet and shining. I started to cry.

RABIA KAPOOR is a writer from Mumbai, India. Her stories and ‘non-poems’, which often dwell on themes of insecurity, belonging, and hope, have been featured on platforms such as Buzzfeed India, The Quint, and Homegrown. Having completed the prose fiction MA from the University of East Anglia, she’s now working on a novel that’s deeply rooted in the geography and vivid characteristics of Mumbai. She is primarily interested in the quiet intimacy and tenderness of female relationships with their surroundings, with each other, and with themselves. Through her work she is looking for the generous potential of the world.