Leaving by Wasima Khan

*THE BLUE FROG 1^st PLACE WINNER*

Introduction by Guest Judge Dr. CAMILLE U. ADAMS

Leaving opens with one of the longest sentences in this beautiful flash piece that otherwise makes use of clauses that are punchy, concise, informational, and brief. This first sentence contains a journey and a compelling ‘why?’ question. These are enacted through its diction, its establishment of setting and location, its revelation of the speaker’s state of mind, and by dint of the protagonist’s seeming dearth of emotion.

Openly expressed affect remains—at surface level apprehension—off the page. Except, Wasima Khan utilises superb crafting because a wealth of sentiment is actually abiding in the white space. Abundant grief, longing, need, nostalgia, love, regret, and deep yearning for a now-dead mother, for a now-exiled from homeland, for now-far flung family lurk and wait. These intense emotional states are well-paced, and they travel the page with the rapt reader held under their spectral command. Then all those feelings, that the protagonist is ostensibly not expressing, break the banks. In you. I cried at the end of this evocative narrative as this mournful elegy demands.

Khan makes use of greater technique than just show not tell. Leaving is organic, diasporic call and response that puts the reader in its world and under the story’s spell. It is a work of striking immediacy. Accomplished with strong visuals, dialogue, propulsion, and attention to the sensory. We are in Kenya with this speaker, attending the funeral of his dead mother. A mother who, knowingly and sagely, speaks from the grave. A mother reaching out to a child who does not yet know his way.

I loved this piece of writing. Unequivocally. And it was my honour to select it for The Blue Frog Flash Fiction Prize first place.

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The telegram had been sitting on the hallway floor for three days before I noticed it, folded beneath a slipper I had long given up looking for. The message was brief: Your mother has died. Burial Saturday. Come if you wish.

There was no name at the bottom. Only the flat, clerical coldness of obligation.

I arrived back in Kenya on a Thursday. The air felt the same. Wet, bitter, filled with the insistence of the sea. The streets were smaller than I remembered. Or perhaps I had grown too large for them, carrying the weight of another country, another language. In England, I was never asked where I was from. Only why I had come.

My brother Salim met me at the dock, thinner than before, the hair at his temples turned to ash.

“You’re late,” he said.

“She’s still dead,” I replied.

He did not smile.

The house was unchanged, though there were more cracks in the plaster. The bougainvillea had swallowed the gate. Inside, it smelled of dust and cinnamon, as if the air itself refused to forget who had lived here.

We buried her in silence, beneath the neem tree she used to talk to as a girl. A few neighbors came, said prayers in voices that sounded rehearsed. No one mentioned my name.

That evening, Salim handed me a shoebox. Inside were letters, receipts, two rosaries, a key I didn’t recognize, and a photograph of our father: stern, shirtless, holding a fish larger than his chest.

“Is this what’s left of her?” I asked.

“No. That’s what she left for you.”

The box smelled of camphor and regret.

Later, while Salim slept, I walked through the house. I touched the walls we were beaten against, the tiles we scrubbed when the colonial inspectors came. I found her radio, still tuned to the BBC World Service, a sound she never stopped trusting, even after they forgot us.

I remembered a story she once told me, about a boat that never arrived. Her father had waited years for that boat, certain it carried a cousin who had gone to India before the war. Every month he checked the port, asked for news. The cousin never came. He died believing the boat was just delayed.

My mother said that was the way of our people. We mistake silence for patience.

In the morning, I asked Salim why he hadn’t called me himself.

“She didn’t want us to.”

“And you listened to her? Even at the end?”

“She said you made your choice when you left.”

I wanted to argue. But I had made that choice.

The last time I saw her, she had stood at the gate and refused to wave. “You will lose yourself there,” she said. “You’ll return only when there’s no one left to forgive you.”

I had thought it cruel. Now I saw it wasn’t cruelty. It was certainty.

That night, I walked down to the water. The moon hung low, unsure of itself. I took the key from the box and tried every lock in the house. None fit. Perhaps that was the point. Some things, she meant for me never to open.

On my final day, I found a letter buried in the folds of a Qur’an she kept beside her bed. It was written in Kiswahili, her handwriting small and exacting.

“To my son who left:

I was never angry that you left. Only that you left with nothing. No pictures, no language, no stories. You pulled yourself out like a weed from the soil and called it survival. I hope England was kind to you. I hope it let you sleep.

When I was a girl, I used to pray for silence. This house had too many mouths, too many ghosts. But now the silence is so complete, I hear my own thoughts echo like strangers.

You do not need to come back. Only, if you do, come back whole.”

I folded the letter carefully and placed it back in the Qur’an. I did not take it with me. Some things are only meant to be heard once.

At the airport, Salim handed me a cloth pouch. When I opened it, red earth spilled into my palm, fine as powder, carrying the scent of salt and sunbaked clay.

“From under the neem,” he muttered. “She said you always needed help knowing where home was.”

I boarded the plane with no suitcase, only the shoebox and soil that stained my hands.

I still don’t know where home is now. Somewhere between here and there. Somewhere between silence and forgiveness.

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WASIMA KHAN — Wasima is a Pakistani-Dutch writer, poet, and jurist from The Hague, the Netherlands. She is the 2025 winner of the Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in About Place Journal, Fourteen Hills, Redivider, Santa Fe Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere.

Art by ALI McLAFFERTY — Ali is an Austin-based artist and writer moonlighting as a high school history teacher. Her fiction has been published in The Forge, and Flash Frog has featured both her flash fiction and several of her art pieces. She loves working in acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite pencil, and believes every surface–paper, wood, walls, stone, or skin–is better with a little paint on it. When not writing or creating artwork, she spends her time gardening, mountain-biking, and dabbling in green witchcraft. Her biggest fans are all the neighborhood children who demand painted tattoos on every limb.