My Sister’s Life as a Series of Rooms by Nora Nadjarian
In “My Sister’s Life as a Series of Rooms,” Nora Nadjarian constructs a series of rooms as both physical spaces to structure her inventive flash fiction and as amorphous images through which she explores, mosaiclike, how distinct moments come together to form a life. The reader grows up with the narrator’s younger sister, following her from her nursery to sterile exam rooms to smoky lounges to the incubator of her own child. Nadjarian thus carefully balances specificity and singularity so that each moment and room, while distinct, thread together to follow the sister’s journey of transitioning from child to woman to mother. Reflecting on how “the complexities of our lives are acted out behind the closed doors of private spaces,” Nora Nadjarian is able to invite a reader into the intimacy of a closed room and the intense relationship between the narrator and her sister, positioning audiences within some of the most vulnerable and evocative moments of the sisterly bond. Within the seven unique rooms of this flash fiction, life begins and ends, children become mothers, and above all, two sisters love each other. —CRAFT
Room 1
Which is pink or maybe sugar-white, and a cot and little fists stick out of a blanket and peachy cheeks and my mum bent over. The room is always quiet and milky and her little nails scratch a bit when they touch my hand, grasp my finger. There is no clock on the wall but my mum always knows the time, it’s always time for and it’s not time for. The blanket has little lambs on it. The curtains have stars on them. There’s a moon on the ceiling and some Fisher-Price mobile with a string you pull for Rock a bye baby on the tree top. Etc.
Room 2
The classroom where my sister is the only dark-haired girl and the only one who speaks more than one language, and the classroom walls are plastered with Do this, Do that, We did this and So-and-So is the Star and my sister cries and doesn’t want to go in and I have to find a way. Look a rainbow, look the alphabet, look a lunch box, look so many crayons. My sister says she wants to go home and the teacher asks Is there something I can do. There is a cartoon frog on one of the shelves, maybe Kermit, maybe some other name and when the bell rings my sister’s hand squeezes mine tighter.
Room 3
In the exam room my sister doesn’t look up, at least this is how I imagine it. She tells it differently. Piece of cake. Sailed through. Almost licks her lips when she says she expects great results, our parents will be so proud. When the head calls us from the school to say she has excelled, my mother blushes, my father’s face is flushed. They just say Thank you, Thank you. My sister’s face is sallow and she later describes the room as shitty, the exams as crap.
Room 4
In another room, my sister is examined by a doctor. His cold hands on her stomach, his cold eyes on her breasts and she tells me it’s so lonely being touched by metal in there, so freaking arctic. She says all this for a one-night stand and proving something to herself. She says Promise not to tell and I do and we don’t. The room is dark grey, the room is metal, the room has a ceiling which drips a single drop like a drop of cold sweat on the forehead, and my sister says nobody will ever understand. This.
Room 5
Where she meets her future husband, the smoking room in Frankfurt Airport. In a clouded cubicle, he lights her cigarette and asks where she’s from. She’s wearing her business suit and so is he. Planet Earth she says and he laughs. The story told over and over, embellished with the brand of cigarette, the colour of his tie. But really she says I couldn’t see him that clearly. It was like being in a club, a tiny cubicle club, no music, no dancing, just puffing and pretending they were normal when in fact they were all killing themselves. In that strange smoky place between countries he gave her his number.
Room 6
My sister holds our father’s hand. He coughs and the bed shakes, the pills rattle in the small brown bottle and my mother looks away. A nurse walks in, takes his temperature, walks out. My sister tucks the bedsheets under the mattress, looks down at her feet. I think I’m pregnant she says, I think I am I think and then she stops when my father coughs. These hospital beds so narrow like cots, these grown-ups waiting and eating in silence, sleeping, forgetting. Our father, helpless and tiny like a bird she tells me later.
Room 7
It’s a girl. Only if she wants to be says my sister. In the incubator in Room 7, see how she’s clenching her little fists.
NORA NADJARIAN is a poet and writer from the Republic of Cyprus. Her work was included in Europa28 (Comma Press, 2020) and in National Flash Fiction Day anthologies in the United Kingdom. Her short fiction has also been published in Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit, and matchbook, and was chosen for Wigleaf Top 50 2022 (selected by Kathy Fish). She placed third in the Welkin Writing Prize in 2025. Her recently published collection of poetry Iktsuarpok is available from Broken Sleep Books. Find her on Bluesky @noranadj.bsky.social, on Twitter @NoraNadj, and on Instagram @noranadj/.
Featured image by Amsterdam City Archives, courtesy of Unsplash.
