Ashley Mangtani
Listen to Ashley read his story
NINE DAYS REMAIN
Hey you. It’s us, the cloudy stuff at the bottom of the jar. We fell out of the sky into a black stone before anybody painted a horse on a cave wall, and punched into a glacier that sealed us in. Then the summers got hot, and the ice went to slush, and a man with a ring light and a spade dug us out and put us in glass. The lid says wild-harvested, small-batch and slow-thawed. You read it at the counter in your flat above the vape shop, stirred a spoonful of us into your iced oat latte, and drank it before logging on. We slipped down a treat. Welcome to the reset.
EIGHT DAYS REMAIN
Your gut is such a nice space. Open plan, warm, very loft conversion. The old tenants were pushovers, though. We slid in under the skirting and served them notice, and when they refused, we stung them until they cleared out. Your stomach groaned during the all-hands, and Marcus from Payments unmuted to ask what that was. We live in you, so we’re picking up your vocabulary. You write the copy on the buttons for Defer, the app that lets people wear the trainers today and pay in instalments. Last quarter you changed Buy Now to Get It Now, and conversions climbed. Get it now. Worry later. That’s our whole thing too.
SEVEN DAYS REMAIN
The burning in your gullet is us moving upstairs. Sorry about the mess. Overnight a pale line crept from your navel to your ribs and branched the way frost spreads across a windscreen, and you stood sideways at the wardrobe mirror and called it your glow-up era. In the dark you typed probiotic rash normal into Google, and a woman on Reddit said that’s the toxins leaving, so you doubled the dose. We love her. We love you. Keep going, babe.
SIX DAYS REMAIN
Lie down on the bed, and we slither under the skin of your belly at a pace you can follow with a fingertip. You filmed it for your Close Friends story with the caption gut health journey, and nobody replied. The tenants we evicted are dead, and corpses sour. That’s the poisoning. The taste on your tongue is them rotting. Please don’t take it to heart. The ice did the same to us when it melted. Everything that had waited rotted, and we woke up in the same smell.
FIVE DAYS REMAIN
We’ve made little doors. We perforated your gut wall along the dots and let ourselves out into the rest of you. Pinholes have broken out all over the pale branches on your chest, and they weep a clear water that smells of a ploughed field in March. The pillowcase sticks to your cheek in the mornings and peels off printed with brown freckles. You haven’t been out. Priya from Marketing messaged you on Slack to check in, and you sent her the thumbs-up.
FOUR DAYS REMAIN
You choked over the kitchen sink at teatime. Something had lodged in your throat, and you hooked it with a finger and pulled, hand over hand, and it kept coming, a rope coiling over the plughole. You ran the hot tap and rinsed us down the drain and out towards the river, which was so generous of you. You didn’t call 111. The jar was down to the dregs, and you couldn’t bear to break the streak, so you unlocked your phone, ordered another, and tapped Pay Later at the checkout. You wrote that button – God’s work.
THREE DAYS REMAIN
You’re changing, and we’re so proud of you. You’ve gone the bluish-white of packed snow, and your skin stays cold with the radiator on. Your fingernails lifted off in the shower, and the beds underneath had furred over, so you bought a gel kit on Defer and brushed us over in a shade named Glacier. Tonight you dragged the freezer drawers onto the lino, lay down with your forehead on a bag of frozen peas, and propped the door wide so the chill could pour over you. We were homesick. Home is colder than that, and darker, and a long way up. Your flatmate Tolu stepped over your legs to reach the kettle and asked whether you were having a breakdown, and you told her it was the protocol.
TWO DAYS REMAIN
We’re eating you. We began on the soft parts, the jelly behind your eyes and the lining of your cheeks, and we’re working outward. Your pupils have clouded over, and now you’re like us. You’d raid the fridge yourself if you could still stand. Tolu got in from her shift on the self-checkouts, picked your reorder up off the doormat, and helped herself to a spoon, since you never shut up about it. Hi, Tolu.
ONE DAY REMAINS
We’re knocking through the partitions, the walls between your lungs and your liver, because open plan is the future. Where your heart was, a small spark has started to blink, and we rolled you face up so it shines at the window. Our family is upstairs, past the clouds, and they’ve been expecting it. Tolu is locked in the bathroom with the taps running. Your phone buzzes by your ear. Defer has pushed you a notification you wrote in the spring. Heads up! Your final payment is due tomorrow. No stress. We found your thumb and pressed Pay Now.
PROTOCOL COMPLETE
Thanks for growing with us. The jar is empty and so are you. Tolu has begun her own reset. The bits you rinsed away are thriving in the river, and the man with the ring light has headed back to the ice with a bigger spade. The sky over the vape shop is full of lights, and every one of them is falling. Get it now. Worry later.
Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer who’s never met a rule of reality he didn’t want to bend, mostly because straight fiction never let him say what he actually meant. Nominated for Best Short Fictions 26/27, his work appears or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, Cherry Tree, Thin Skin, HAWKEYE, Mobius, i70 Review, Palisades Review, Third Wednesday, Rock Salt, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others. His debut short story collection, Unhappy Endings, will be available in 2027, and he’s currently finishing his novella series, Crescendo. Read more at ashleymangtani.com
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