Conundrum by Will McMillan

Elvis Presley’s warbling on the overhead speakers as Mom and I browse a warm, wood-splashed Barnes & Noble. She wants to buy a puzzle for my nephew in Florida. She turns to me. “Oh god, the day Elvis died?…
Elvis Presley’s warbling on the overhead speakers as Mom and I browse a warm, wood-splashed Barnes & Noble. She wants to buy a puzzle for my nephew in Florida. She turns to me. “Oh god, the day Elvis died?…
Preface We almost hit a deer, the night we drove up. We had the high beams on, and they broke through the darkness of the long dirt road that led to Happiness House, but we mostly saw encroaching leaves…
Chapter One I. At dawn, Mom says not to wake the others, but I don’t think anyone’s sleeping. We crouch beneath the low tarp shelter that’s tied to a fence post with the wire of someone’s earbuds. It is…
She said she wanted me to meet her parents up in Squamish the week after I came back and that if I wanted to die it would be okay, but only after I meet her parents. So we drove…
You fluff the white rice for lunch. Aroma of fermented soybean paste stew wafts in the air. Gazing out the open window, you tense. You slap the rice paddle on the counter and rush outside, charging headfirst across the…
Content Warning—suicidal ideation The story I tell goes something like this: Did you know I once helped a boy escape from a mental hospital? When I tell it that way, people start imagining things: guns blazing, alarms blaring,…
By Nick Almeida • If you had grown up in my house, “You’re dollaring me to death” would forever echo in your head. The phrase is one of my mother’s favorites, inextricably linked to any requests for small amounts…
In David’s previous life, he was a mad scientist. According to him, I was a lab rat. I’m chopping the remaining half of a watermelon and am more concerned about the ant infestation I had eliminated yesterday because I…
My dead Aunty May visits me while I assemble the baby’s crib. Her pale blue fingers catch my wrist while I’m twisting the Allen wrench to secure the right side panel. Delia, my wife, is at work. Aunty May…
Content Warning—miscarriage, childbirth I wake up to a uterus on the pillow next to mine. It looks vaguely like the image I saw on the pamphlet when I was browsing for birth control. I close my eyes again. The dull,…
I once read that a woman’s body knows when it is of “child-bearing age.” And sometimes, it punishes a childless woman with more painful period cramps. Sometimes, it might be due to stress; sometimes, just a visceral reaction to the news.
Usually, I start my stories from a single image. A vegetarian not belonging at a pig roast. A uterus that has detached itself from a woman’s body. If the image feels compelling, I start from there and try to add some characters and spin a plot around it.
When I started writing this story, I just wanted to explore the relationship between a woman and her uterus. It was going to be a flash fiction piece about a woman whose uterus had somehow detached itself from her body. She now had to process how she felt about not having a uterus anymore. But when I got to that part, I was stuck. I couldn’t come up with a reasonable ending to the story. I didn’t know how to take the story forward. Usually, when I felt this way, I leaned even more into magical realism and surrealism to tell the story. But this time, this approach felt inauthentic.
I began to journal around that time. As I wrote about this story and my own feelings, I realized things were never simple. The protagonist could feel both guilty and relieved. The realization that she no longer had the option of having a baby, even if she wanted to someday, complicated everything. I realized I was processing my own rage at what was happening around me and the lingering internal conflict as I acknowledged my bodily autonomy. I had to explore this intimate and personal space before taking another step forward.
It became clear that I was focusing on the wrong things. The visuals that stayed with me—the detached uterus, the pig roast—were never the point. The ideas of who belongs in motherhood, who’s allowed to have children, and who’s ready for it financially, emotionally, and physically made their way into the narrative. I needed to identify these central themes and what they truly meant to me in order to finish telling this story.
NEERU NAGARAJAN is an Indian Tamil writer. Her fiction has appeared in The Maine Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Stonecoast Review, GASHER, and elsewhere. She’s @poonaikaari on Twitter.