Just One Thing with Neeru Nagarajan

Neeru Nagarajan’s flash “Deadheading” gives us a tender portrait of a woman drowning in the flowers growing from her own body.. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“‘The short answer: I’m afraid of feeling the things I feel without any guardrails, so I use magical realism and surrealism as a playground where I give myself permission to feel things.

I was one of the few lucky people in the world to not have just one or two parents. I had three very invested ones: two mothers and one father.

Recently, I lost one of my mothers to breast cancer. I live thousands of miles away from India, but I managed to spend the last five weeks of her life with her. She was bedridden, and I had nowhere else to go except her side, so we spent all our waking hours together, watching old swashbuckling Tamil movies, singing along to love songs, and most importantly, laughing. Finding reasons to laugh during that time was not easy, but she had a stellar sense of humor and that helped enormously.

A week after she was gone, I had the strangest dream. It gave me an excuse to write honestly and to relive those last few weeks I got with her. And that’s what I ended up exploring in “Deadheading.”