Associate Editor Connor Yeck: Where exactly a character navigates their grief makes all the difference in a story, which is why Anita Goveas’s “Inversion can feel like weightlessness” is a one-of-a-kind experience. What was meant to be a narrator’s “personal memorial” soon unravels into a ticking clock that balances catastrophe with memory. Goveas crafts a tense examination of the ways we remember, reflect, and face the private and public devastation of a loved one lost.
To hear Anita read her story, click below:
Inversion can feel like weightlessness
When the Inversion Inferno roller coaster stalls, Deepa’s the only passenger still upside down at the back. Her overstuffed handbag gapes open, and the Pyrex dish holding her dead husband’s tarantula tumbles into the empty car below. It doesn’t scramble away like everyone else, it stays, hairy-legged and blackly-brooding in the midst of tear-streaked family photos and unpaid bills.
Blue-jacketed ride workers help free the other thrill seekers whose safety harnesses have malfunctioned and imprisoned them in the flame-painted cars. An acne-scarred, skinny-jeaned attendant approaches Deepa’s car and the one below it, squeals like he’s seen Elvis, and flings himself over the side. They’re not that high up then, but Deepa’s losing all spatial awareness as blood floods into her brain and her view is consumed by unreadable eyes.
Her frozen buckle snaps open under the relentlessness of gravity, but Deepa holds on to the safety bar, suspended. She has nowhere to go. Coming here to Vijay’s favorite place after the funeral was her personal memorial, but muscle memory had propelled her, and that impulse has vanished.
Deepa is alone, surrounded by shrieking crowds and the throat-searing smell of overcooked popcorn, anchored only by a slender bar. She’s forgotten again. Staying means the emptiness is interrupted for a while. Vijay was safe and always certain, and she never had to decide. The spider waves its front legs, once, twice, a warning, a farewell, then seemingly sinks down. Liberated.
She lets go.
Anita Goveas (she/her) was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology and most recently by Fractured Lit, West Trestle Review, the Bulb Collective and Vast Chasm mag. Her debut flash collection, Families and other natural disasters, was published by Reflex Press in 2020.
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