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…
“My Sister’s Life as a Series of Rooms” is structured as a life story that uses physical spaces—rooms—to represent different stages or moments in somebody’s life. Each room encapsulates a mood, a conflict, a revelation.
The story was initially conceived as a sequence of poems—each section, like a room, containing its own atmosphere, yet contributing to the larger picture. The word stanza comes from the Italian word for room, a connection that carries a poetic resonance. As more rooms were added, I felt that the detailed narrative lent itself to the freedom that flash fiction would give me. By structuring the narrative around these distinct “rooms,” I was able to explore the cyclical nature of life through a person’s experiences.
Although the story is presented as the life of a sister and is for the most part fictional, it inevitably contains autobiographical elements and memories from my own life. I distinctly remember the room where my baby sister slept in her cot, the softness of the blanket which covered her tiny body and the patterns on it. I remember equally well the sterile atmosphere of several rooms where I’ve taken written exams throughout my life. Framing the narrative around a sister’s life created a slight distance between myself and the story, allowing me to reflect on my own life journey by blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. The scene where the father lies in a hospital bed, for example, is also drawn from my life, but I decided to juxtapose it with the fictional announcement of a pregnancy, to emphasize how a phase in our lives can develop in unpredictable ways. While writing this story, I thought about how often the complexities of our lives are acted out behind the closed doors of private spaces.
Ultimately, this piece is both a personal exploration as well as a creative reimagining of life’s phases, highlighting the contrast between how one experiences life and how it is perceived by others.
We leave this world in a room, just as we entered it. The rooms we inhabit tell our story, shaping our existence in ways we often don’t realise. This, in miniature, is the journey of life.
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/.
