Gone Lawn
a journal of literature
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Gone Lawn 33
Summer Solstice, 2019

New Works

Vaishali Paliwal

Tales of Expansion


Statement is being recorded. First question of the investigator being how was the weather that day.

Turns out it was another crisp golden morning by the alive coast of dolphins and men waltzing with inviting waves. This city was cluster of varieties of living and nonliving drivers but everyone at a safe distance, and everyone focused on the same roads in and out of the same mansions and the same skyscrapers. From the forty ninth floor you could look down at the slow moving red lines of efficient and experienced drivers. There was a symphony in the movement of steering wheels, blue tooths, sun glasses, lipsticks and flying hair of youth. These were flawless trained machines with no interruptions. All of it was a perfected design.

And then she got on the road.

Her days were of electricity. Her shaking hands, breath and legs moved her to fast lanes, rapid art, short conversations, nervous parties, red skin, one ferocious cat. She was always thirsty, always breaking into smallest fragments whether in motion or not. There were blocks of light in her blood streams clogging her, pushing her, blowing her into multiple whirlwinds of dimensions. She dreamt, she dreamt, she dreamt, then she slept to dream again. In between pauses she would run untamed, undesired, unconscious. There was always somewhere to launch into, always some place to free fall from. In her diseases, she would look to self-heal by traditions, rituals, experiments and science. She was always knitting. If it can be written, she was the virus born to break trajectories as if deliberately placed to decode the design.

So here she is this golden morning trying to merge with the established flow. Her space full of clutter, all the dirt fallen from her dried throat and jagged knees. Universe is calling for her attention to collisions. Her mother is asking her to not look into the voluminous streaks of light that would blind her eyes. But she has stepped out of her forehead lines to enter the dark coliseum and listen to the master playing alone without instrument. She is wondering how he composes the notes, how he creates the melodies and the disharmonies, how is it here that there is music out of nothing. She follows the echo to a seeming source of possibly where master might have been playing the music from. As she gets closer, music enters her ears like sea. All she sees is a pin on black clear floor, one with a spark as if trying to expand itself.

She opens her eyes to having crashed with the mirror driving from opposite direction. She has disrupted the design. She has caused a traffic jam. People are starting to ask if she is okay and what might have caused this unexplainable accident with no one else involved, no physical damage seen. Everyone knows of a crash but cannot see one. Everyone is starting to dream.

Investigator has continued to search for witnesses and evidence but with no breakthrough or new information to the case. He has continued to interview her but her words are of new language and her eyes of undisturbed snow. She is now unreachable. He cannot stir her he knows. There is a shiver in his hands, breath and legs now. He has been gulping down gallons of water and has been seen carrying wires. He has joined piano classes.


Vaishali Paliwal is an artist working on finding an expression to 'the ultimate experiment'. Sometimes she does this with words. She aspires to build, break and rebuild all that art is to her. Currently she resides in Los Angeles where she works on her spiritual practice and writes poetry and short stories from her other worlds. Her poetry chapbook 'Lion's Tooth On Migrating Chests' was recently published by The Soap Box Press. Some of her other published writing is in Platform Review, Genre Urban Arts, Peeking Cat, Eunoia review, Somnia Blue, Indian Periodical and Thirty West Publishing house. You can reach her at paliwalvaishali@gmail.com.