Mehreen Ahmed is an Australian novelist. Her historical fiction, The Pacifist, is a Drunken Druid’s Editor’s Choice. Gatherings, is nominated for the James Tait Black Prize for fiction. Her short and flash fiction have won in The Waterloo Short Story Festival, Cabinet-of-Heed stream-of-consciousness Challenge, shortlisted by Cogito Literary Journal Contest, shortlisted by Litteratuer RW for Litt Prize, finalist in the Fourth Adelaide Literary Award Contest. A Best of Cafelit 8,three-time nominated for The Best of the Net Awards, nominated for the Pushcart Prize Award. Also, critically acclaimed by Midwest Book Review, DD Magazine, The Wild Atlantic Book Club to name a few. She is contributing editor and jury to the KM Anthru International Prize of the Litterateur Redefining World Magazine and a featured writer for Flash Fiction North and Connotation Press. Her Toads on Lily Pads was curated by Cambridge Press on Muck Rack. She is widely published online and in anthologies. She has published eight books, and her works have been translated in German, Greek and Bangla. 

The Ceaseless

If Ash can’t sell cow’s milk, then there’s nothing much he can do. Because he is paralysed from waist down. His son tends the cows and sells milk at the bazaar for him. Sweet treats are made from this milk. Except, his pains persist. But he cannot resist but crawl down to the cowshed today to see a new fledgeling calf born. He watches the cow as it gives birth, while it growls in pain, the calf struggles and slithers out—a breath of fresh air.

The thunder god complains from his closed temple doors that while he hearkens to people’s darkened hearts, he is not remembered much. Perhaps, once in while with some deference as a point of reference to pantheon of all gods without any offerings to the altar, songs or dance, his cosmic powers wan. The rain maker who brings fertility to agrarian lands may very well be crumbling biscuits with a lightening strike. Should the cowshed burn in his fiery hands, it will jeopardise the economic pipeline until Ash and his son can save up to buy another? This fledgling calf shares the shed with her mother. Ash’s skin-deep wisdom makes his possibilities limited but knows this much that without the cow, he will not survive, just as without rains crops will not grow.

However, a deep existentialist paradox threatens the god of thunder which is that while he is reduced to a dot in the minds and the imaginations, the milk-seller thrives. Today, though, there is a  coffin below. A wife bathes it and covers the deceased in a blanket because she shrinks to think that the dead must be feeling odd in those petrified, cold bodies—one short life to live.

Despite his pains, Ash’s optimism grows. He trusts his cow is his saviour, and the crops. He can see them, feel them and eat them for sustenance. He loves the rain which brings fertility to the agrarian society. They are his real gods. What does he know? His wisdom is only skin-deep. Surely, the ceaseless thunder god knows better. Or does he?

Ash drags himself to the calf and rubs his hand over it. He picks a name, Pinky. Pinky sucks the mother’s udder for milk, but before it is done, Ash’s son comes along and extricates Pinky from his mother’s udder and starts milking the mother in a bucket. Once the bucket it full, he takes it to the bazaar. Ash looks on at the hungry calf which tries the suck up the dry udder for more milk, but not one drop comes out.

Mother groans, the fledging groans, Ash groans. He understands the pain only too well which no god can cure, no matter how many times he may have prayed. A cog in the maker’s system, thousands of years of devotion wouldn’t change a thing; yet the thunder god rages that it loses devotees by the minute. The god sees his own demise in that coffin as he ceases to exist in the hearts and in the minds.