Puddles and Stories

She wasn’t born on a bleak January night and it wasn’t pouring either, but that’s how she liked to imagine it was when she was born.

The sun had just set. A faint hint of an orange tinge in the horizon showed that the sun was here a while back. The air was heavy with moisture and everything seemed pregnant, the air pregnant with moisture, the horizon pregnant with the on setting night and Zinnia pregnant with her baby. Pregnant to the point that it all seemed ready to brim over any minute. Partially it was Zinnia’s imagination and partially it all was true, because that’s how monsoons in Lahore make one feel anyway, especially one who is not accustomed to the uninvited guest that the weather like playing the role of.

She poked her finger into the ground, turning it by bending the lower bit into an L. she seemed to be looking for something in there. She took out the finger that had turned all muddy with the monsoon rain lazily pattered away as if it had all the time in the world and whispered to her between the plip and the plop, “This isn’t your land, this isn’t your story.”

Someone's at the Door

I did ask around for you. I swear I did. I asked them nicely. I asked them politely too. In turn all I got were a few hushes whispers. A sneer here and a grunt there.

It has been so long since I wrote the way you liked my writing, but I am trying to write in that manner. I promise I am.

Lately, my throat’s been bleeding. I wake up every morning with drops of blood smeared and dried on my white, filled cotton pillow-cases.

I want to tell you more about it but my fingers are swollen due to the wounds.

I’ll write to you some other time.

I’ll write to you on a better day, telling you of better times.

Oh! It is someone at the door. Knocking.

[Gets up. Walks to the door. Unlocks door. Gasps lightly. Tries to breath as invisible hands wrap a transparent cling film around her face]

Let the Demon Reside

I have a monster living inside my belly. It has scaled brown-with-mud paws with bits of shimmery green that’s able to catch the light every now and again through my windpipe as I open my mouth wide enough. It slits open these nooks inside of me. A small, nearly 5 mm notch a day. Blood seeps through these notches, trickling down like the tears of the woman weeping on the moon as she spins day in and out. It’s not the usual crimson, fresh and cascading blood that you usually see when humans bleed. It’s more of a rose madder tone with a tinge of purple to it as if some purple bougainvillea has been crushed to form a thick yet crunchy paste and added to it.

The monster flickers out its snake-like tongue every once in a while, to lick at the blood forming a thick, enamel pool at its feet. Licking it enough to just get a slight taste of it that might make him survive through the day as he tried to savour it through its taste buds.

It visited me every night in my dreams. I would usually forget the contents of the dream itself though would remember the vivid surreal surroundings and description of the monster itself.

If I remember correctly, in my nocturnal world, I am close friends with it, but if so is the case, then why does it gnaw and scathe at my insides like it does. This thought leaves me completely baffled making my head spin like a child’s top on a floor with psychedelic patterns in neon colours.

I wake up to find myself hanging loosely like a string puppet, from suspending ropes, in a room filled with mirrors of all shapes and sizes as well as all deforming proportions. My wooden feet are nailed to the ground holding my body still as my head spins round and round crazily as if I’m a key at the back of a walking circus doll.