Assistant Editor Toni Judnitch: Shruti Swamy’s “In Blue” captures a sense of shifting identity at the core of new motherhood. The speaker’s attempts to reach for stability, to understand this altered role and life, is perfectly rendered in a scene of floating at sea in search of shore. Through the masterful use of fragmented sentences, Swamy captures a dreamy timelessness that allows readers to enter and drift along in the in between.
In Blue
The bed was an island. No, the bed was a sea: all blue. My body the boat. She the passenger. Arrived, marooned. For days and nights like this. For days and nights, a skyless edge, a no-time, very salty, when the patterns of light and dark, sleep and waking made no sense. When the wrecked boat made no sense. When the passenger has lost everything that had come before—and it was as though nothing had come before. Of course she cried. Of course the boat weeps too to smash her hull on bad land. And no rest, for one. For other a strange doze. And then awake a wide, hazy stare at the new surroundings, evanescing no wonder. Her skull fitted like the base of a coconut in a palm’s curve. Then she was silent, very still, her mouth slightly open, her hands and toes curled, her eyelashes very, very thin: but in her eyes just a glimmer, a tiny point of awareness, through the animal fog. All the windows were open, yet we were alone. No ship would come bearing rescue. We would have to swim together to a better shore.
Awarded two O. Henry Awards, Shruti Swamy’s work has appeared in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her story collection A House Is a Body was published in August 2020 by Algonquin Books, and her novel The Archer is forthcoming in Fall 2021. She lives in San Francisco.
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