Inheritance Tax
By Pravy Jha
My father taught me how to lower my voice
before he taught me how to raise a question.
This was not cruelty.
This was preparation.
At dinner, silence passed like salt.
Everyone took some.
No one complained about the taste.
I inherited my mother’s hands,
good for holding things together,
bad at letting go.
In school, they said ambition was admirable
as long as it stayed theoretical.
In relatives’ houses, I learned
how futures are discussed
only after girls leave the room.
When my grandmother died,
we divided her belongings gently,
as if grief might shatter.
No one asked who would inherit
her unfinished sentences,
the words she swallowed for peace.
I carry them now,
tax-free, undocumented,
heavy as proof.
Artist’s Statement
The first impulse behind “Inheritance Tax” came from a quiet discomfort I could not easily name. I was thinking about what we inherit beyond property or money; not just land or surnames, but habits, silences, and unresolved histories that pass through generations almost unnoticed. The story grew out of that unease. The sense that sometimes what is handed down is not a gift, but a weight we are expected to carry without question.
I was responding, in part, to the way families often protect themselves through omission. Certain truths are softened, delayed, or buried entirely. Yet they persist, shaping how we understand ourselves and each other. I wanted to explore that tension between what is said and what remains unspoken, and how that gap creates its own kind of inheritance.
In writing this piece, I focused on restraint. I did not want to over-explain or resolve everything neatly. Instead, I tried to let the emotional undercurrent surface through small details and moments of recognition. The hope is that readers feel a slow realization rather than a sudden conclusion.
More than anything, I want the audience to sit with the discomfort the story offers. To consider their own inheritances, not just in terms of lineage, but in terms of memory, silence, and responsibility. If the story lingers in that space, then it has done what I hoped it would.
Pravy Jha is a student writer from India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Last Syllable Literary Journal, Outskirts Literary Journal, and anthologies such as Upon Learning That and Rooted In: Rite. She finds inspiration in Rumi, Khalil Gibran, and the storytelling of Jane Austen and Khaled Hosseini.
