TRASH CAT LIT

Sushanth Shyamsundar

The God of Unfinished Things

The God of Unfinished Things stopped by different times in my childhood – when I couldn’t stack building blocks properly straight, when I stopped eating yoghurt and greens leaving food untouched, when I couldn’t finish crying ugly. I was an unfinished child and adults kept finding holes poked in my antsy answers.

Other children put their desires in the right colored boxes; mine were strewn across the marble floor drawn in haphazard crayon tracks. But The God never corrected them – six fingers drawn around my five, a door where a wall should be, a street dog asleep beautifully around the inconvenience of one leg. Half a sun, half a prayer, half became one of our favorite numbers.

“Will I become normal?”

“Become?”

“You know.”

“No.”

The answer should have frightened me, but it made me dance, internally tickled.

Unfinished things pass by quickly through the years, the child is still here, rearranging furniture within adult. The God is here too, vandalizing the world: coloring skies, exploding volcanoes, rearranging strange hair, leaving bizarre books where strange children might find them. On some occasions I help – move a boundary two inches, give an unnamed feeling a ridiculous name, write poems with no endings.

“Better?” I ask.

The God tilts its head.

I planted crooked trees that bend backwards badly, they do whatever crooked trees do with sunlight. Somebody on the beach in front of me is falling in love incorrectly, I give them unsolicited advice in between ice cream cones. Somebody has survived the day without becoming the person they were promised, we celebrate. My old questions wander home wearing flower garlands and olive crowns.

Nothing is finished. Thank God.

I keep learning the rules of unfinished things: the world keeps answering to

The Animal That Refused its Correct Shape

They said the old bastard had been badly assembled, like somewhere there existed a diagram God had  drawn up for dying creatures. One leg shorter than the others, its spine made a question mark beneath fur, and when it ran legs danced a jig that only it could ever learn. Other animals learned speed, height, balance, the clean mathematic design of four feet landing squarely where four feet were expected to land after four feet had jumped into the four feet of glorious breeze. This poor creature had to learn corners, edges, stop-drop-and-roll, patience. It learned the cool dark shade under cupboards, the narrow stretch of a rusty drainpipe, gaps under fences where fragrant earth loosened after pounding rain. It could not leap vertical onto the wall, so it scrounged supreme below it: beetles carrying crumbs twice their size, fallen feathers caught in static weeds, a child’s red marble missing since summer. When it moved, people watched and made the face that mistakes pity for kindness. The wily old fellow watched them back, amused because it did not know it was supposed to want another body. Its body brought it to the warm square of sunlight beside the bins every morning. Its body kept itself occupied, tail to follow tactically. Its body had survived angry winters, rabid dogs, listless mobs, animal control, various wheels, and a veterinarian who had said, gently, that quality of life was difficult to predict. Yet, when old and silvered, it moved crooked, jittery and uniquely deliberate. It continued carrying  its irregular outline through gorgeous gardens, while the world insisted on perfect parallels. Every day, it woke up, danced its dance, soaking life beautiful under sun and stars, no matter what anyone else felt. 

Sushanth Shyamsundar is a writer from Chennai whose work moves between horror, surrealism, dark comedy, tenderness, and the occasional badly behaved god. He writes fiction, poetry, and screenplays about strange bodies, stranger desires, memory, identity, and people trying to make livable worlds out of whatever they have been given. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in a range of literary journals and anthologies. When not writing, he is usually watching horror films & wrestling, or spending time with his animals.

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