Tag: short story

The Moon Bazaar

As she neared the bazaar, the brightness almost fooled her into happy thoughts. She could smell the warm notes of cardamom and incense mixed with the acrid stench of moonshine from the bordello.

Somewhere in this fluid timeline that I live in, lucid dreams flow. I don’t know where one ends and the other begins. I dream of my past life, my life before captivity. It feels like someone is briskly cleaning that slate, but I try and hang on to whatever memory I can.

Adolescence

This is as disappointing as that time I put pencil shavings and a few leaves of basil in an empty matchbox and chanted some gibberish to turn it into gold coins.

How to Clean a Cast Iron Skillet

Wipe your skillet clean with a dry towel. Water makes iron rust. Rusting isn’t good, for skillets or people.

I cannot focus on my books. The peeling green wallpaper, the holes in our heavily stained carpet and my mother’s tired eyes like two broken windows are all pictures of our rusting lives.

Birth of an Era

When she stomped her feet like a petulant child, the matchstick world trembled. Her cosmical body moved to a terrifying drumbeat only she could hear, all the time ululating in grief over the horrors she was unleashing on her own children.

Tiny Shoes

With their candyfloss pink tutus, their hair high in slick buns and their flesh-pink ballet shoes, they looked like elegant flamingos.

Stranger than Fiction

She flaps her wings and melts into the horizon. It’s freezing here. I can feel my blood coagulate. It probably looks like strawberry jello on the inside.

Madame Ripple’s Timepieces

This place is dark, not literally. It must be around 10 in the morning, but the city is as quiet as a cemetery at night. It sucks the air out of me. This seems like a place where where happiness comes to die. The air hangs thick, as if the sky was filled with viscous tar. I see barbed wire everywhere. The staccato clomping of combat boots is probably the only heartbeat this place has.

Travel Lore

Dusk was streaking the Californian sky with ocher and saffron. Redwood trees towering above me had started whispering ominous secrets. Two trees had formed an arch ahead.

Spice of Life

I take refuge in her when life trips me and kicks me in the gut. She always listens, intently, without an urgency to respond.