My mother says I will die
a burden, like her mother
in law, who died too slow
in a two-year process, time
consuming her like a tree
root. A sacred fig, ficus
religiosa, can live for three
thousand years, but my
mother is so thin she’ll live
forever. Or, like glass,
a million years. No living
organism can break her
down. Her weak father
had a tumour in his brain.
He went to America when
she was sixteen and that’s
when his dying began.
He died for twenty-six
years, which is how old
I’m turning this month,
which is how old Ma was
when she accidentally had
me. Two years ten months
later––my sister, intentional.
She started young, thirteen,
but her dying was intermittent
at best. Now it’s a decade
later, she’s giving it her all.
My therapist is worried
about her. Her therapist
has two small dogs who sit
in a wingback chair and
yip, angry, when patients
cry. My therapist has a sister
who went to school where
I go, and a grey tabby called
Cricket. Not like the sport
but like the insect who chirps.
Her therapist asked to speak
with me and I sewed my lips
together in a pliant smile.
Chirped non-answers sweetly.
My mother’s mother and
father’s father are still living.
What am I doing wrong,
my father’s father asks
sometimes. He stopped
going to the doctor
when my grandmother
stopped being alive.
How she inspired that
kind of devotion I’ll never
know. She was beautiful.
He gave me her pink
glass bangles in summer.
If I take care of them, they
will last one million years.
I don’t want to die in Texas.
I don’t want to live in Texas,
either. There’s a sacred fig
trapped in the business school,
which feels a cruel joke.
I cried there last Tuesday.
Two girls from two
high schools I went to
killed themselves in 2020,
and one girl in my year
in college was hit by a car
in Amsterdam. Amsterdam,
of all places, what is it to die
in a country not your own?

Sanjana Thakur is a writer from Mumbai, India. She is the Asia Regional Winner of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, The Rumpus, and The Southampton Review. Sanjana is a graduate of UT-Austin's New Writers Project and Wellesley College. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

Landry McMeans is a full time artist based in Austin, TX with a passion for color and the American West. Purple mountains, neon sunsets, and saguaro cacti have been staple subjects in her work since she first picked up cardboard relief as her primary medium in 2005, however, her primary medium has shifted to printmaking. She now designs large scale and elaborate hand-cut stencil prints.