For the Mouth of the Sea by Shrutidhora P Mohor

When I first saw him, he looked like a creek.

Uneven, tattered, often inundated.

Backwater syndrome, I smirked. Not quite sufficient on your own. Never sufficient on your own. Always a sneaky entry. Placid, although the mighty ocean is a stone’s throw away. Wasted. Seeing the sea, but not being the sea. Wasted, I repeated.

On our first date, not that I cared much for one, he turned into an estuary, the setting sun sparkling on his brows, marine life full-ish, flowing, flourishing in him.

I suggested building a canoe for easy transportation, not that I wanted to navigate much, but just in case.

For the next few days, he was a woodpecker, the constant hammering of nails keeping me sleepless, finally a little excited, ready for a journey, well, almost.

On our first boat ride upstream, I discovered he was an able boatman, his muscles up and down like hardened dough, the oars his compass.

It is then that I saw a bay in him.

Wide, both still and stormy, open, a home to hungry clouds to snuggle and pick up moisture, to change hues, to hang heavy in their own weight. Low pressures, cycles of low pressure. The gloom, the beating, the downpour on his chest. A bay has to be a mother, he explained. Clouds are often on tantrums, noisy, burping, shaking, clenching teeth, and the deluge that follows. A bay must take it all.

Like you? I quipped.

Hopefully, he smiled.

Over the years, he grew into a lake. Serene and composed. Blue and green, golden and pink, luminous almost always except when ominous.

Lying quiet and contained, a safe zone for kids’ paddle boats, and letting the breeze caress him until the sky poured for days, for weeks, grey and gloomy, dark and devastating, and once they lifted the sluice gates, he was flooded, flowing over his brim, as crazy as a wild horse on the run.

“Where’s the harness?” I cried out.

In the distance, the swaying horse tail crashed.

For years now, he sits tapering into his wheelchair with a helpless smile on his face.

I’ve got your back, I assure him as I warm up his massage oil. His legs are like old ropes, twisted, coarse, rusted at joints. That’s art, avant-garde, I whisper as I bring my mouth down to his head and gently roll a kiss between his eyebrows.

Sometimes I see him touching the upper part of the wheels absent-mindedly. His feet clutch the footrest below. He shuts his eyes as though he is on a speed ride through air. Perhaps he can hear the bugle?

I fear he wants to fling himself out.

I fear he wishes to dive, to fly, to plunge.
I scamper towards him and hold him back, hugging him to the back of the wheelchair. “Don’t’!” I beg.

“I won’t.” He smiles. His eyes are like red stones. “I know I can’t. Just a strip of backwater desperate for the mouth of the sea.”

Shrutidhora P Mohor (born 1979, India) has been listed in several competitions like Bristol Short Story Prize, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, the Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Retreat West competitions, the Retreat West Annual Prize for short story 2022, the Winter 2022 Reflex Fiction competition, Flash 500.
Her writings have been nominated for Best Micro fictions 2023 and the Pushcart Prize 2024.
A collection of short stories titled A Moon-Measure of All Things (Alien Buddha Press, February 2025) is her latest publication.

Twitter/ X handle @ShrutidhoraPM
Instagram/ Threads @shrutidhorap
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Photo courtesy of Shrutidhora P Mohor

For the Mouth of the Sea was first published in The Airgonaut – link here