Her language makes no sense to birds with the freedom to cross continents.” “Kumari does not step outside the cage, but instead leans her head against the bars, repeating herself. It washed away the buttery lustre in the flower heads, even diseasing the pleated skill of the buds.”Īnd here, in ‘ Kumari’s Cage’, when Putali’s pet parakeet, whose wings are clipped, laments her loss to the wild parakeets that come down from the trees in a downpour: Here, in ‘ The Blood and the Flowers’, in which Putali and Avery are making flower garlands for a festival, but many of the marigolds are dead:
Dirt, decay and blood are part of life alongside sweetness – blood from the fish as they die, pooling from a rubbery leech which Putali burns off Avery’s foot with her lighter, from Avery’s foot again when she cuts it on a sickle blade, and her memory too of the sad way in which her husband died back in Iowa. The relationship between the two younger women is portrayed with tenderness, though without romanticism. In this way they make their small protests against convention, as does Putali in making sketches of sleeping naked men at the bus station. In ‘ An Everyday Colour’, Khusbhu tuts at Avery for wearing red, the colour for brides, while she herself wears white, the colour of widows, like an everyday colour. She builds up layers in the story, as we glean information about the three women and their relationships from details of their lives. So it is with Walsh’s Birds with Horse Hearts, which deservedly won the Bath Novella-in-Flash Competition in 2019. And all the more so, I think, in a successful novella-in-flash, where each story sounds on its own, but is part of a peal of bells which leaves a strong resonance. When I was asked by Vancouver Flash Fiction recently for a flash writing tip, I wrote that the best flash fiction creates sound waves like a bell, its meaning amplified by the space around. But they are bound to Khusbhu, until Putali is torn away from both of them. She fantasises about rescuing her from the lonely men at the bus station ‘where she stays up all night and never boards the buses’. ‘She’ll want to hear about the foals that stretched velveteen muzzles out towards me from between the legs of guarded mares, and all the space there to make a new life.’Īvery is drawn to Putali, feels that in some way she mirrors her dead husband Narayan.
Khusbhu had declined her invitation to undertake the journey with her, but Avery will tell her about the horses: She visits one near Jomsom, but has no idea whether it is the right place and takes the bus straight back to the Terai. But there are many villages in Nepal with that name.
Avery, a young woman from Iowa, meets Putali and Khusbhu during her travels in search of the place called Baghmara, the village her husband came from.
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