** THE KNOCK FROM THE WRONG SIDE **
by SOHAM SARKAR, India. Third place in the Writory International Poetry Contest, October 2026, scored 94.04 out of 100.
SOHAM SARKAR
"** THE KNOCK FROM THE WRONG SIDE **"
** THE KNOCK FROM THE WRONG SIDE **
Every winter, at 2:13,
three knocks rise from the door
we removed after the flood.
Not the front door—
the little blue one at the back,
where the paint blistered
like rain trapped beneath the skin.
On the first night, a boy stood there,
holding a paper boat so carefully
the water could not fall out.
“Is she home?” he asked.
Behind him, the street shone black;
no houses, only moonlight
where the river had learned our names.
“No one lives here,” I said.
He studied my hands
as though I had arrived
wearing someone else’s.
Then he placed the boat on the sill.
Inside lay a key, green with river,
and a note written in the blunt capitals
children use when they fear
they will not be believed:
**I AM STILL IN HERE.**
He returned the following winter.
Then the next.
His coat grew shorter;
his face did not.
Each time, the same question.
Each time, the same answer.
At last, I stopped sleeping.
I kept the hallway light burning,
though the wires had been cut.
On the seventh night,
he led me to the river’s buried course,
where asphalt covered the water
and weeds stitched the road
with their dark, unruly thread.
“You took the window,” he said.
“You left her the door.”
I laughed—one dry, defensive sound.
Then I saw the crescent scar
above his left eyebrow,
the cuff my mother had mended
with thread too pale to match,
the small finger bent
from an old and forgotten fall.
My own face,
before it learned
the useful grammar of forgetting.
The flood returned in a single breath:
the kitchen table lifting;
my mother pushing me towards the window;
strangers hauling me onto the roof;
her palms against the glass,
her mouth shaping my name
through water I mistook for silence.
For forty years,
I had told it as the story
of the mother who let go.
The boy held out the paper boat.
“Did she get out?” he asked.
I searched my memory
for a door opening,
for a hand reaching mine,
for anything beyond the water
and the years I had spent
turning terror into certainty.
There was nothing.
Only the blue door.
Only three knocks.
Only a name
the river had never managed to keep.
Then, from somewhere beneath the road,
three slow knocks answered us.
Not from the house.
From the other side of the door
I had spent my life insisting
no longer existed.
The key turned warm in my palm.
And through the drowned foundations,
through the roots and the buried street,
through all the years I had mistaken
silence for an ending,
a woman's voice called my name.
Not the name I answer to now.
The one my mother gave me
before the water came.
Read the winning poems