Fiction
October 2021
A Father's Discourse
by Ami Rao
It takes him two hours to tell the story… the story of a fourteen-year old girl… the story of his daughter. His daughter who died. When a girl dies in a car accident, returning home from school, her father is left to deal with his grief. Sent home from work for the crime of showing his emotions in front of strangers, he and his wife cannot bring themselves to utter their unspoken thoughts of guilt and blame. Alienated from the world and, to some degree, his own mind, and with his marriage slowly collapsing, the man starts to consider his grief. With her beautiful and lyrical prose style, Ami Rao experiments with language to explore grief, one of the most complex of human emotions. Inspired by the essays of Barthes, this fragmented and philosophical novella is deeply moving.
