shoumikmuhammed

[shoumikmuhammed]

EYE

I.

There was a moment’s shuddering, a moment of eyes going wide, the face going taut, and then still. Hers have always been an impassive  child-like face, innocent yet expressionless, and probably only came alive when he couldn’t see it, in pitch black darkness, under the sheets with the moisture of his tongue trudging slowly and cautiously across her. He had always wondered, basking in her gasps, if her eyes were as lifeless as they always were, as inscrutable and impenetrable as a polished hardwood floor. He held her face close, still in shock, and traced his fingers over her perfect features. He never got used to her face, her gaze, her wall-like demeanour. It always unnerved him that in his discomfort, at her indifference, lay her pleasure.  Moreover, the ringing laughter in his ears had not stopped.

Her name was Poushi. He met her one dark mid-winter. A mere week after he lost his mother. He met her on a new year’s night among a pack of thrill seekers on a sugar rush, punch drunk and playfully frolicking in a hallucinatory chemical induced Garden of delights. He had been an atheist for about 10 days, and he was still hesitating and letting their tipsy little rebellion soak into him drop by drop, shot by shot. He struggled with his first joint, he coughed, and retched. He struggled to take the smoke into his belly the way he was advised. He popped every last pill he was offered.  He took a swing at whatever wall he thought was holding back with a battering ram if not a hammer and a chisel. Caution was a luxury he had lost his taste for.

There was a faint buzzing in his ears. As the numbness slowly came, his phone went off playing “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” intro. Used to be a favourite of his father, his mother always told him. He laughed a little, he cried a little at that thought. He had never seen his father. Mother told him he was happy elsehwhere, in a man made garden on the top of the clouds in the arms of a hundred something concubines with wings. She probably hoped that would keep him praying five times a day, and Lord knows he did, hoping she gets better in her decade long battle with cancer. She never did. She just took a very slow, painful exit, leaving him alone on the stage. Alone, confused, and scared for the very first time of his life, before his fears gave in to purposelessness.

It was a call from his girlfriend Protima. Her every call was a pang of guilt. She kept on calling him every hour, day or night, rain or shine. He’d ignore most of her calls, with his legitimate excuse being need for some space. Yet she called regardless because she knew what in his every moment alone he was doing to himself.  She was more worried about him that he was. He had given up on himself, but she was holding on. He resented it. He hated himself for resenting it. He hated how anything and everything about the world felt like tentacles growing in the depths of his lungs, constricting air passages. In one such moment, he found God. Or at least that’s how it felt.

“Imagine we are Two dimensional” said a cool female voice from somewhere in the head beside his as he lay, paralyzed on the carpet, numb and nauseated, palpitating, panicking while “Knocking On Heaven’s Door” rang and rang on, and he watched odd shapes swirling around the spinning fan on the ceiling, spirals orbiting  it like galaxies around a center. “Imagine if some sad motherfucker felt it would be funny to drop a tennis ball into our midst. What would we see? Us, sorry little two dimensional dip shits.”

He was too numb to even utter a gasp as the shapes in the ceiling seemed to zone in and our of there, rising like bodies from a grave, from mere sketch to full fledged shapes, lights dancing as the spirals became loose slinkies, playful and yet maddening to watch as their ends flew closer and closer to the center , towards the edges of the wings of the spinning fan, becoming faster, becoming too strainfully fast for his eyes to follow, yet he could feel the loose threads on the ends of those spirals, the weight of the ultra cosmic matter reacting adversely to being in the wrong place, in the wrong time. In the wrong reality.

“A dot is how it begins.  A blip.” She went on. “Then an ever widening diameter, a surface,  an incomprehensible edge that grows wider and wider till it shrinks, and goes back to being a dot, as it sinks past us.”

The threads were fasts, slowly undone near the edges, sliding in faster and faster, the spirals spinning towards a center, like a Universe collapsing in on itself, sending ripples, pink one second, then a bright blinding yellow, with a molten tinge of orange, then red, then purple then blue.  The waves crashed gently on to the people, the children of the night who were blissfully oblivious, as they laughed, cajoled, binge ate, drank, made merry, and gave heads. He felt a discarded packet of Durex hit him in the face, flicked by a careless, lustful someone nearby. He ushered all his might so he could turn his head and have the packet fall off, so he could watch the collision, the Big Crunch. It was like watching a glass ball shatter, explode, bang! Into a dazzling light.

“What if..” the girl beside him droned on “Divine intervention is simply an event like the tennis ball? We just can’t see miracles. We can’t see God, we can’t see shit. Stuff just happen around us, phasing in sinking out. This just ain’t fair!”

It ended in elation. A strange, overwhelming sense of relief. A feeling of soft fabric on a bony, cancer eaten shoulder of a loved one, tear friendly and ever welcoming. It was a feeling of blissful affection that washed over him. He had never cried in front of everyone, even while he took his mother’s body with his very hands into the depths of her grave. He didn’t shed a drop, while everyone around him uncomfortable waiting to. And now here he was, sobbing, sobbing and sobbing and almost choking in a room full of intoxicated strangers.

As he slowly came to his senses, the face of the girl beside him was on top of his.

“Saw Him too, didn’t you?” her eyes were shards of ice. “I think He likes you.”

II.

His name was Protik.

“I love how our names fit.” Said Protima all of a sudden, while she rested her head on his life, watching a movie on her laptop. She had this habit of saying things out of the blue. More often than not, things she had said a thousand times before.

Protik never understood why. To her she was always this jigsaw piece that seemed to complete her life, but he never understood how or what value he added there. Or what value she added to his puzzle, aside from being a doting, rebuking moral compass he frankly no longer needed. He shrugged off that thought. It’s just a phase. He told himself. His growing disdain of her, his awareness of her extra pounds, his awareness of the missing excitement he once felt around her. The thought was a screaming cancer patient that he tried to strangle with a pillow that read, But she loves me.

He thought of that every time he went back to the place he liked to call the place where he saw God. Back to that mysterious girl named Poushi, who always carried drugs in unsearchable places. He thought about Protima, about her cool, controlled beauty, her sophisticated, morally upright (given the cultural context) view of the world, her dedication to her family, her rigid set of rules that upheld social values instilled into her. In a nutshell, her refusal to let him fuck her.

He felt a light slap as Protima pulled him back out of his reverie. “A Penny for your thoughts?” She asked.

How do you tell someone that their presence in your life gets cumbersome at times? How do you point someone towards their extra pounds? How do you tell someone you hate the taste of breakfast in their mouths? How do you tell someone you hate yourself to the end of the world for feeling so damned ungrateful towards someone who goes out of their way to make your life better, and you sit back thinking of their very own effort as some kind of a price they pay for a claim on you.

“Ah, nothing.” He muttered. It’s just a phase. Those four words were his mantra now. Those four words where his mantra while he let himself slowly get comfy in the arms of someone else. It’s not cheating, I’m just meeting a basic fucking need. He’d angrily think to himself while Poushi went limp, like dead weight, watching him hungrily pounce on her, explore her, and violate her. She’d just  lay on her back, and stare at swirling shapes in the darkness (rule number forty two, lights stay off!).  After they were done, usually within minutes, they’d sit back for a while. Both would know that Protik was quietly waiting for her to get him what he really needs.

It had been a week now and they had been meeting every evening, either at a friend’s place, or a cheap hotel . There had been no coming back, since Protik’s brush with divinity. He never even asked what it was. He didn’t really care anymore. Reality had ceased to interest him. All that mattered anymore in his life was the few minutes of sheer joy, of crippling exhileration that reduced him to tears every time. He heard her, moving around in the darkness, heating a spoonful of solvent with her lighter, he heard the fizz of the dissolving solute.

He thought about how she had explained to him about things slipping in from one dimension to a different one, 3D to 2D. The more he thought about it, the less it all felt delusional, less like chemicals messing with him. What if we always had the image of God in our heads all wrong? What if you don’t “see” him with your eyes, but feel his presence even with eyes closed? That should explain the overwhelming  flood of emotions that ran amok in him. To think God was somewhere traipsing along the covalent bonds between the molecule, just a ���devil in the detail”, he thought and chuckled. He was aware that reason was corroding fast, but he let the lapse of logic wash over him over the days. Maybe this was all he needed, just a little bit of help to really see Him.

“I never see you taking this.” He had said.

“My eye’s all open now.” Said Poushi. “I don’t need help seeing Him like I used to.”

She slipped back into bed with him, with a filled syringe. He inhaled, awaiting the prick, and asked her, “does it feel the same every time? why can’t I feel him anymore?”

“Have you been sleeping right?”  Protima asked him.

The answer was no. Something had been keeping him up the last three days.

III.

It had been weeks. Protik had forgotten what the face of God feels like. What it felt like to have a presence make him go numb from exhileration, and happiness. He had forgotten what it felt like to be in his mother’s arms. But every time he had Poushi inject him with a shot of what she called “The Pilgrim’s Chariot”, he’d no longer feel the bliss the way he felt the first few times.

It all stopped the day he caved, and the very first time he let go of himself and cheat on Protima. Poushi’s fingers slowly walked over him, and traced paths, slowly blurring lines with slow burning desire, and pent up rage that a subtle curl on her lips seemed to enticingly call out to, to smother and incinerate it to a wisp. He merely stared back, took his time to consider, and let his composure corrode, not for the first time. It was no different from every time he sat next to his dying mother, who wailed and sobbed in pain every night. And he fought the urge to end her pain with her soaked pillow underneath her.

He’d thought of a million of ways to justify it, the way we all do, the way life keeps forcing us to eat our own words and ideals time and time again. And we take the bait, move on with our lives, and call it growing up.

Today, a full month after he’d last seen God, after numerous failed attempts to try and do so, Poushi lay limp. Being choked was one of her favourites and it took Protik weeks of practice to do it safe, by carefully identifying vein laden pressure points on her neck in the dark.  He had spent hours practicing it on hmself, hoping to stop breathing one evening by accident. Willing, praying that his very hands fuck up, and catch him off guard on their own accord. Praying, for a sleight of fingers, and here he was in bed with a prayer answered wrong.

He shuddered, and felt his stomach grow cold and heavy. It hurt him to move, as he sobbed and placed his head on her chest, keeping his ears pricked for traces of noise, or movement of air in her chest cavity. He heard nothing. Just ringing laugher. A cold cruel ringing laughter that shook the walls and kicked dust off bookshelves. He felt the bed shake, and a piece of crockery shatter. He closed his eyes and clung to Poushi’s limp frame. There was nothing in the world he longed for more than to switch places with her.

He heard his phone ring. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. It was Protima. The only person to ever call him. He quickly wiped his tears and answered. His mind raced. He had to tell her what he had done. He would turn himself in. Maybe that’d be the only way he could just remove himself from her life, and stop being her beast of burden. A piece of luggage that never returned her the love she deserved. He was a cheat, and now a murderer. She could do without him.

“Somebody has to do something about that clingy girlfriend of yours.” He heard a familiar silky voice whisper to him in the dark. Followed by a  laugh. A cold, cruel, ringing laugh.

[shoumikmuhammed]

Chivas Legal

What woke him up was a faint buzz of a smartphone under his pillow. It wrenched him from his dreams of brown breasts.

Arif leapt off the bed to the floor the moment he realized it was broad daylight from the deep golden rays that crisscrossed through spaces between the red curtains. It said 12pm on the clock. Missed it again he thought. His second job interview in months. He turned 30 last week.27. He corrected himself and sighed. 27, officially. And unofficially, his perpetual state of being unemployed, drunk and broke was losing its charm. He cast a look at his neatly stacked formal wear his teenage girlfriend had ironed for him. There was a note pinned to it with some money. He pocketed the note, peeked out of the door. “Your Pet Monster turns legal tonight. Best of luck and be back soon. Got a surprise for you.” The note read. Samia always called herself his pet monster. It was her birthday, and he was to get a surprise from her. Arif sighed. Samia tried too hard to make life feel like it was on his side sometimes.

He wasn’t a very welcome visitor in the very house he spent his nights. In fact, last time he met Samia’s parents, he was graciously escorted outside with some kind words about himself. Like “Vagrant” and “Degenerate”. He was too wasted at the time to not return the courtesy with a finger.

He quietly studied his route from her bedroom door to the exit. He snuck in every night after everyone was asleep. Snuck out when Samia’s parents were out for work in the afternoon, and her housemaid was doing chores where she couldn’t see him sneak out. Once his coast was clear, he tiptoed out, and made sure to pocket a slab of cheese and some chocolates from the fridge. Zero rent. Free chocolates.

Despite missing a job interview, he managed to not be late for a date. It was some girl he met on Tinder. A voluptuous, almond eyed, honey skinned bomb-shell who tried too hard to come off as a poetry nerd. He greeted her with a phone in one hand with an outgoing text to his mother in Chittagong, announcing to her that he was out of money. In his other hand was a liter of Chivas Regal loosely disguised in a plastic Pepsi bottle. As expected, she was not the DTF sort he was hoping for (Down to F…Fornicate). Instead, they tiptoed to her rooftop. She brushed away his gentle advances in the elevator with a laugh.

“I wanted to be a writer all my life. Since I was like, seventeen. The urge really took shape once I moved to Dhaka some years back. It’s a strange city, does strange things to your mind.” said Arif. “I’ve always been honest about the fact that I did so because it got me girls.” He added with a smirk.

“Oh” said the nameless girl he met on Tinder. “You get published a lot?”

“Meh.” He said. “What’s the point? Who reads anyway? Kids are too busy sharing feel good positivity memes and putting on dog filters on photos of themselves. Who cares about art, or the meaning of life, and things of the sort?”

“By kids you mean teenage girls.” Said the nameless girl. She clearly knew him better than she let on. “And not much luck getting on print I take it.” She added.

He wanted to disagree, but couldn’t. He stared at Dhaka skyline, its half constructed bones shakily out-climbing one another. Crud was what they called his attempts at writing. Forcefully bizarre, pretentious. Liquor was a scrub that usually scraped his thoughts clean. They flowed from his mouth and his fingers. Although, his ‘honesty’ wasn’t appreciated enough, by his friends and editors alike. But there was a perverse enjoyment to it. To knowing that the world wasn’t ready for him. To knowing that his words, his art was ahead of its time. He was Zarathustra, he was some protagonist in some migraine induced nightmare of Nietzsche’s.  Destined to be misunderstood and ridiculed as opposed to being revered. The mere thought was his mantra.

He felt a pang of affection for Samia. She was the only person who seemed to understand. Behind her plain-ness was her unconditional admiration for him.  Alongside her never ending gushing about his amazing writing, and her encouragement. She kept on telling him what a turn on it was that he was a writer. She told him that he was her influence, all though he had never read her write-ups. He always wondered whether she chose him because she had very little to pick from aside from drunken less than average looking delinquents like himself. It was funny, and sad, how some love lives are built on the foundation of who has more options than whom.

“Why’d you move here?” the nameless girl asked him.

“Back there with my parents was captivity. You know, I was raised to take care of my dad’s big business. I grew up watching my uncles and their extremely routine lives, chained with neck ties.” He spoke with deliberate gaps between his words, enjoying his dramatic wording, ignoring her indifference. “Needed to get away.” The true reason was far sillier. He moved to Dhaka over his obsession with a certain writer named Marzhia Hasan. Her writing had gained notorious publicity worldwide overnight over an infamous novel about six rapists who are systematically hunted down by a former victim, a housemaid. A harrowing novel from the view of the rapists as they are slowly hunted down by the cleaver wielding vengeful force in the shape of a woman as she murders them in their homes. A story that sparked controversy over its graphic depiction of every character’s gradual descent to insanity in the face of their helplessness. The novel was unique in its religious and sexual symbolism, and powerful in its execution. This divisive and elusive Marzhia Hasan who no one had ever seen was to become a literary force, a Stanley Kubrick with the keyboard, sparking criticism and reverence alike. She would go on to keep writing. She maintained a blog, with an active interest in the kind of things that get bloggers killed. Her writings would mirror the horrors of the society, the uncertainty, the insecurity, the anti-intellectualism. Her stories were the unleashing of rage at status quo. Marzhia Hasan was declared, by her fans, a voice for the marginalized. She was brutally honest, with a twisted sense of humor. A hero with a pseudonym. No one ever knew who she was.

Arif, as he read her works, was horrified at how this unknown writer outdid him, using the very style he so badly wanted to master, perfected his very own methods of writing. It hurt him personally, watching her become the icon that he could have been. Yet in his own masochistic way, he liked it. He wondered how she looked. In his mind’s eye, she was a young journalist, who used the keyboard as a cape. A tortured soul, a heavy drinker, a tigress under the sheets. He often caught himself daydreaming meeting her by accident. Maybe one day, while browsing in some corner of Nilkhet, over a conversation about George Orwell. Or maybe, the very same way he went on seeing and meeting random girls. Maybe one day, she’d reveal herself to him during an intimate conversation while they shared a cigarette after making passionate love. Like clothes slip, her mask would to him. He’d gladly tend her scars.

Arif became obsessed with her. She was everything he ever wanted to be. He tried to reach out to her through her blogs, sent her one email after another. Posted in her fan groups on Facebook. He and Samia bonded over his obsession for her, and his desire to be like her.

“Maybe, she is the one who tries to be like you.” Said Samia one evening. “You’ve been stockpiling stories in your blog like a decade before she started.”

It was a flattering thought. Much too flattering for a guy who only dreamt of the things Marzhia Hasan pulled off.

It was 2 Am when he woke up next to the nameless girl from Tinder. Turns out she had been DTF after all, just playing hard to get. Bored enough to spread his legs for him past her liquor threshold. He woke up to find about 33 missed calls from Samia and 42 text messages. He decided to take a walk back to her apartment. Samia’s home was three blocks away. He was sore, and hung over and cranky about having to go wish his girlfriend. He decided he no longer wanted to wake up next to Samia every morning. He listed one flaw of hers after another in his mind, his excuses. He hoped that they outweighed everything she did for him. She answered the door with a questioning look and dark shadows beneath her eyes. Stains of tears. He calmly told her that he was done and handed her a present. The remaining Chivas Regal in a smaller Pepsi Bottle.

Without so much as a flinch, she asked him to wait. She went back to her room and came back with a note, and a copy of Marzhia Hasan’s new book. It was due to be released 2 months later. He stared at her with his mouth wide open.

“Where did you get this?” he asked her.

“Goodbye Arif.” She said. A fat droplet of tear rolled down her cheeks as she closed the door as quietly as possible.

When Arif was downstairs, he sat down by a door. He took a swig off the bottle of Chivas Regal which Samia had graciously declined, and opened his book. He noticed that it was dedicated (in print), “To Arif, from his Pet Monster.”

His heart raced as the thought hit him. He quickly opened her note. It read: “I hope you find yourself someday. I always believed in you. I just want you to know that you made me who I am. Your very own monster.

Marzia Hassan”

There had always been subtle hints. But he never knew the person he always wanted hid beneath a mere rearrangement of that name.

Samia N. Zarah.

(This story was published in Golpokotha 2016, by EMK Centre and painting by Ruhul Abdin)

[shoumikmuhammed]

The Shrine

One

He had quite a few sketches of the Shrine back home. He made them himself. His mind had never quite left the place and spilled on to copies worth of paper which spilled on to batches worth of scrap in waste paper basket. He carried this place with it wherever he went like a rotten skeleton in a briefcase. Today the skeleton ripped its way out and began dancing on its toes.

With every step, he felt his heart try to claw its way out of his ribs like a caged beast, tugging at his thoughts like an obstinate mule refusing to carry its load. His age was about as much on his side as the dense, creeping, smothering fog burning in his nose as he tried to breathe in. He felt his way through the trees down a familiar dreaded path he had hoped never to retrace his way through. This far out in the wilderness one can’t help but feel like a bait waiting to serve hidden hungry eyes silent, ever watchful, feasting on the sight of the intruder and prancing around the edge of his perceptions, tainting and gnawing at his senses, watching him stiffen from fear and basking in his apprehension.

When Ranjeet Acharya was made the Deputy Commisioner in Mumbai, his boss, the commissioner, while jovially clanking the wine glass with him told him stories. Exciting tales of notorious criminals. Stories of bravery. Stories about dealing with casualities. Career ending injuries. Deaths of comrades.

“Occupational hazard”. Said the older man.

There was one implicit aspect about the career both men knew and it was fear. The fear of all the agony.

“You keep yourself shrouded in its folds for long enough and you get used to it.” Said the commissioner. “But even the wisest of grips shake, and the truest of aims quiver.”

Sometimes not even years’ worth of sights, smells and encounters can make to and overshadow the burning self-inflicted gashes of sins. He felt them beckoning him as he trod, one small step at a time towards the Shrine. Amplifying pulses of dread weighed his every movement as he edged towards it, while he trembled eyeing the strange moss laden edifice of limestone. About ten steps away from the entrance, he heard an agonizingly familiar music of anklets of a woman running. He chose to disbelieve himself and shut his eyes ignoring the unwanted tears that drenched his contorted face. He could swear there was a laughter over that noise. I laughter of a woman he spent years willing his mind to forget.

“Focus…” He muttered.

Two

Ranjeet’s son Manmeet had been missing for a week and was last sighted by a brothels in a town by a lake nearby.

Worse, Manmeet was an obvious murder suspect. A gruesome dismembering of a prostitute with a butcher’s knife. Her body was found in one of the hotel rooms in halves and halves of halves with severed pieces where nailed to a wall, geometrically arranged in a vast, strange concentric circle. The ten toes and ten fingers marking the outermost periphery with bits and pieces of messily cut up arms and legs inside, followed by another complete circles made by folded intestines leading to the lungs with the severed head nailed to the wall by the forehead in the center. It was not as neatly done as one might think. It was horribly out of proportion, more a set of enclosed connected longitudinal waves than circles. Manish was seen by locals running into the woods with what appeared to be a still beating heart, which was the only thing said to be missing from the butchered corpse.

“Occupational hazard,” said one of the sex workers back at the brothel “One in a while you meet a girl and sooner or later you find her dead. Choked to death. Poisoned. Or sometimes they suffocate under their customers. Or this.” She swore under her breath.

We are nothing but vile refuse of the gods, left here for them to point and mock as we toil and bleed under their torment, one lifetime after another. As man, and as beast. We are nothing but a sick celestial joke sent for nothing but to live and live again with earnest tongues up less than fragrant arses of the jesters.

Ranjeet’s subordinates did all the talking, letting the commissioner sit back and let it all sink in. Their furtive glances at a mourning father went unnoticed. To Ranjeet, all sound was reduced to the buzz of flies hovering towards putrefaction. The world was a cruel haze of yellow and the stench of semen and rot. All he could then see was his son when the latter was a kid, barely thirteen. The Sickly and socially awkward sort. Frail and meek.

Three

One night Ranjeet came back from work having braved daylong onslaught by the press over a missing young husband accused of starving his wife to death leaving her locked up in the attic for over a month. He was still haunted by the look on his son’s face as he walked in on him. In one hand the boy held a picture of his beautiful dead mother. His other hand fidgeted and worked elsewhere. The boy glared into the picture, far too engrossed in his momentary elation as his left hand worked furiously, while his dead mother blissfully ignored him, still living inside that picture, contemplative, serene and awash by sunlight through a window.  Ranjeet had spent the rest of his life trying to forget what the other hand did and what it made him do afterwards.

Then the young boy lay curled up in that bed as his father chastised him with his leather belt, one lash at a time with eyes burning holes through all the screaming and the pleading that tore asunder the damp monsoon air. The father was too blinded by rage to see the veins popping on the boy’s throat that vividly appeared in the light of the lightning laden sky outside the window as the boy screamed still holding on to the moistened picture of his mother. In his mind, all that rang was a taunting laughter, a spiteful laughter of ridicule. The laughter resonated through the empty spaces in what was left of his soul and drilled holes through time itself and haunted him here and today as he edged towards where he last heard it. Towards the accursed Shrine. A part of him willed it to go on flogging his soul like it had been for the last twenty two years.

And that part was in a sick twisted way happy to see him back here today, circling the wide open space around the moss laden Shrine. The much fabled resting place of a lunatic priest who worshipped forgotten darker gods through mutilation and sadism. He and his devout band of followers terrorized nearby villages with murder and vandalism.

Helpless villagers would sit back silently behind locked doors trembling, and praying for their locked doors not to be the ones the lunatics choose to burn down. They’d hide their children under straw beds, in barns and come back to find them in ashes or frothing in the mouth from unexpected snakebites. Croplands would be burnt down alongside protesters. There would be no negotiation, nothing they would take but this. They would feed on the blood of the weak slowly enough to inhale their shallow breaths from squirming in fear. They would savour it and poke firecrackers through bleeding nostrils.

It wasn’t before the British Raj did the terror be met with, and it was met with swift and brutal precision. Twenty three disciples of the mad priest were chased down to this shrine and shot down as they resisted with stones killing quite a few Englishmen and blinding more.

According to lore, the priest eagerly awaited the Englishmen as they walked in to the Shrine and slit his own throat before they could take him.

According to lore, the face of the priest was always contorted in a silent laughter, his eyes always wide as if all he could see was monstrosity. They said his laughter was not out of humor but mere submission to his betrayed senses.

Children in the nearby villages were warned from ever coming here. There were numerous reports of a hairy naked man dancing on nights of the full moon once in a while and flinging excrement at passers by cursing in Sanskrit. An official search was never carried out. The first sighting was sometime in 1972 . The next around 1985 and the one after it in 1998.

“It’s 2011.” Said the village constable “There is a 13 year gap between every sighting. The reality horror shows will get a kick out of him being seen again.”

He laughed at the frowning Ranjeet.

Village elders would be terrified.

“It is obviously the wandering earthbound soul of the mad priest.” A villager croaked when inquired “ A soul as lost as a mind.”

“Occupational hazard.” A deputy told Ranjeet. “When you are in charge of a village, you have to spend much of your hours humoring closed minds riddled and encaged within folklore and mythology.”

Four

Ranjeet took it all in with a knot in his throat. Eyes would flicker onto the dark woods to the East with the Shrine somewhere in the heart of the forest, beating, pulsating, filling it with an ever consuming darkness that Ranjeet had once ventured into in his younger days. He came back haunted, with a piece of his soul gone the cockroach swarm color of the Mumbai night sky, a part of him dead and rigor mortified. And so much more was lost. As winds rustled leaves of that forest he heard familiar sounds of an anklet again beckoning him to the depths of his personal hell.

It was some minutes past 5 AM. He snuck out of the motel to get here, dreading what his instincts told him. It deepened as a familiar voice rang from within the dark interior of the shrine.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore….”

Ranjeet kept a wary distance from the entrance glaring apprehensively into the darkness. He flung the flashlight’s rays into the entrance, and in a trembling voice called out to his son.

“While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door….” Came as a reply

“Manmeet..” cried the father “Come out here right now.” His attempt at sounding stern had failed horribly.

“`’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door –“  Manmeet went on “Only this, and nothing more.’ “

Ranjeet walked forth into through the gate to the shrine, his gun pointed with the flashlight. Darkness hung like a cloud within the interior, overwhelming and claustrophobic. Ranjeet flung the flashlight rays through cobwebs wildly onto the walls, brown from a layer of dirt. He swung The cone of light madly till it landed on a bloody heap of brown flesh, a pair of eyes. A pair of scornful eyes he spent years of his life willing himself to forget but it was always there in front of him, growing like a poison tree.

“A raven made a nest here.” Said the boy in a dull tone. Ranjeet’s eyes narrowed as he watched his son. Naked and covered in blood running from his mouth trickling down to his groin. His eyes were no more than grapefruits. The boy was blind. Fingers had been pushed up those sockets. The boy was on his knees and between his legs there was a pool of blood.

Ranjeet wailed and covered his mouth. The castration had been clumsy and clearly self inflicted. The boy laughed weakly, wincing momentarily, clearly in agony.

“Who did this to you?” asked the trembling father on the verge of his tears.

“It flew away to gather food.” Said Manmeet. “While it was gone, I crushed the eggs. Because I wanted to see if it would weep.”

“Why” said the trembling father “did you do this….” Ranjeet knelt down onto the centre of the room, with his flashlight pointed at his son. He willed it to be a nightmare. The dark corners of the room swam before him and he heard the sound of anklets echoing all over.

“I have been here exactly forty one days, twenty three hours and forty two minutes. When I came here, I was lost.” Rambled Manmeet with blood spewing from his mouth “But are we ever truly found amidst our chaotic and wayward existences?”

Ocupational hazard of being a parent. Things were out of hand no matter how hard you tried. Children often bask in self destruction to rebel. To tip balance the weight of control in their favour just to see what it feels like. It kills a parent when such acts go overboard.

How would you have stood up to it when your own son was a fugitive, a murder suspect, and a ranting, auto-castrated lunatic. It was as good as death to watch him beyond repair. It feels a lot worse to leave the world with helpless children than to watch them go before you do.

“Isn’t a purpose truly over rated? Isn’t meaning nothing but mere pretense? A deception to console us In our darkest moments?” Said Manmeet weakly and laughed.

“Was it you Manmeet?” He asked his son, trembling all over. “Was it you who killed that girl?”

Manmeet went on, “I came here seeking answers.” He laughed again. “This place has a long memory. It stretches back to days before man came. Before this world itself was where it is.” The boy laughed.

“The walls have eyes and ears, father…”

“Let me take you home.” Said Ranjeet, trying to hoist himself off the cold stone floor. “No one needs to find this out.”

The boy vomited a pound of blood onto the floor and beckoned his father to sit back.

He cackled. “Answers have a price, I am merely paying mine in blood only because I was much too cowardly to exact it from others..”

“Why did you kill the girl?” asked Ranjeet.

“Because I was afraid.” Said the boy “To do it myself. To free myself of segregation, of form. So I would be nothing. So I would be everything. So I would shed my skin or my burdens of a label and immerse into cosmic chaos of absolute and intangibility.”

“Do you even know what you are saying?” growled Ranjeet “How could this happen, where did I go so horribly wrong?”

Ranjeet felt his trachea caving in as his son went on. “She must have been eleven. I was to be her first. She flinched when I took my trousers off, unlike those before her who would laugh. She was gentle, and sweet. Did whatever I asked except complying except when I handed her the knife and asked her to liberate me of my manhood. She cowered. Called me crazy. So I freed her. She was too gentle to die every day inside that shithole. I sacrificed her off the captivity she would endure, and left a message for you there..” the boy grinned “I knew you would see it.”

The symbology was a nudge at a case Ranjeet had spent nearly two years trying to crack. There was evidence tying it to an infamous sect of worshippers of Kali in Calcutta. Ranjeet had been forced to step down due to pressure from above. Ranjeet had come home drunk that night and flogged the intrusively curious boy for going through his evidence files

“I have been a terrible father Manmeet,” cried Ranjeet. “But is this how you punish me? By spitting at my ideals? Killing and mutilating? All these just to get back at me? You are better than that Manmeet, Oh Lord what have you done……?”

“You are no father of mine.” The boy growled.

Ranjeet stared back in shock. He knows, but how? His son may have been blind at the moment, but he knew Manmeet was relishing it.

“That’s why you killed mother didn’t you?” The boy went on.

“Because I wasn’t yours? You brought her here to this hogwash of a village in pretense of a trip. Choked her to death in the car.”

Her laughter rang in Ranjeet’s ears again. Manmeet’s weak, tortured laughter rang in unison. And Ranjeet sat down and began laughing along and crying just as he had when he had all those years ago inside this very shrine, far away from home where no one would ever know in pretense of a long road trip after she had one late night in a drunken stupor let him know all the things she let his greatest friend do to her in their own bed while he was away. She let him know how the tiger at the work came to her a mere, broken powerless lamb, how his real face was everything she never loved him for. He wasn’t half the man she was promised when her family married her off to him in expense of her education, her future, her dreams of going abroad and she was living with it. Coping with her emptiness looking for fulfilment elsewhere.

Five

She had laughed weakly and drunk in bed when telling him all this while he lay with his back turned to her with his insides gone cold. He packed her bags the next day, left her son at a day care and took her on a long drive. She was quiet and unquestioning as she came along, just as she always had for everyone around her, just as she was brought up to be, unquestioning despite silent reluctance in a land where it was a virtue for a woman to be powerless to refuse.

After several hours of driving they stopped, Ranjeet asked her to get out of the car. His eyes were on her and she slowly returned the gaze. She was rigid and remorseless, and so was he. Although for a fraction of a second he felt a glimmer of despair behind those hazel eyes, and he saw them again all these years later back inside the place where he strangled her to death, he saw her in her son’s eyes as he laughed and laughed. His body shuddered as he bled with minutes dripping off his wounds. Ranjeet came back to his senses and lunged forward, he had to find help, take Manmeet home. His insides churned.

He was all Ranjeet had left of her.

As he edged towards his son, he saw how everyday Manmeet’s eyes killed him every day because they were his mothers’. He would never forget the look in her eyes when he lay her on this very floor and quietly strangled her. How those eyes trembled with submission and stifled inner turbulence. They cursed him even in death. They tormented him every time he laid his eyes upon her son, silently wounding him just the way she did with her quiet resentment.

Before he was close enough, Manmeet flung out a blood stained butcher’s blade, the one he had clearly used to mutilate the young girl and himself. He still laughed as he pointed the Blade at Ranjeet.

“I came here looking for answers, and found voices which took me onto paths unbeaten, and when I came back the world was different..” said Manmeet “Live. Keep on living and accepting your collective confinement like inbred slaves…I forgive you, father. Your plight far overshadows your crimes. I forgive you.”

With that said, Manmeet drove the raised the blade and slit his own throat.

[shoumikmuhammed]

Peek

(this story also got published on glyphstories.com:

http://glyphstories.com/portfolio/peek/) 

Delwar has been rarely been this far in his employer’s home. The latter’s well decorated living room, overlooked Gulshan streets outside from balcony. His employer, a renowned musician was on the phone, filling the air with exhaled cigarrete smoke and loud greasy words that made no sense to the chauffeur who had been patiently waiting for the last twenty or so minutes.

Delwar felt uncomfortably aware of his aging employer’s very young wife in a room to his right. The door was left half open, bringing into the warm air a bit of air conditioned chill and offering him a smothering slight view of a curved waist softly expanding and collapsing ever so slightly under a multicolored blanket reddened inside the semi darkness of the room behind red curtains. He wondered if her constant impatience still glowered on that face when she was sleeping. He wondered how her dreams must be. Was she just as smug and superficial there, constantly checking her reflection off her phone camera and snapping photos making faces like an imbecile? Dewar wondered whether people who were so perfectly well off had anything left to dream about.

Delwar’s employer walked into the room, briskly bidding farewell to his caller on his phone with eyes on the chauffeur. It struck Delwar how out of shape his employer looked these days. Four marriages, a business worth billions, and a career in music wasn’t easy on the man and his age wasn’t on his side either.

“So, you want a raise?” The employer asked curtly.

“Yes, sir.” Sad Delwar meekly. “My wife just had a baby girl.”

Delwar was so used to the inscrutability of his employer’s demeanour that the latter’s smile threw him off guard. And he nervously smiled back.

Downstairs at the parking lot, he was greeted by other chaffeurs in the building. Some congratulated him heartily. People expect you to get married, have a kid or two and a sense of responsibility stamped into you overnight. As if ties were a proper incentive for fidelity, especially if you never got to pick them. Delwar had no intension to marry and let his expenditures go up. He liked having some money in hand to waste. Coming to the city had been quick to change him from the ardent believer to a cynic, and he saw to it that his newly wed wife stayed in the village. The thought of home gave him a pang of sadness, not because he missed it there. He missed nothing about the stagnant lives people there, the suffocating thought of poverty that he could do nothing to change. The people made him think of choking fish floating and choking in polluted waters.

“I like how they bounce when they walk.” Said Joy. Another chauffeur from the apartment while they stood outside a coaching center few hours later waiting for their respective employer’s kids to come down from class. Joy exhibited symptoms something majority of the Bengali males suffered from, called the ‘Peeping Tom’ syndrome. It involved an average stereotypical sex deprived Bengali man’s tendency to peek at ANY female passing by, regardless of age or dress-up. Delwar found a strange enjoyment in watching Joy’s depraved stares and wondering what went on in his mind. Joy liked his women heavier, and often threw himself at the fattest of the lot every time they walked into the nearby brothel. Joy despised young girls from well off families. Especially the arrogance he thought they carried themselves with and took a savage pleasure in undressing them with their eyes, unapologetically bearing holes into their tight dresses very much aware of their discomfort in his presence as they walked by.

Delwar’s mind was elsewhere. He had plans later in the way and wondered if the impending darkening skies brimming with rains were an omen. He had plans with a special someone and here came the rain to fuck things over. Her name was Nipa. She was thirteen years old.

Thankfully, she was right where he needed to be. Dutifully there waiting for him among the hundred hookers uncomfortably squeezed into a small room with a glass pane view through which customers eagerly peeked into, tasting each and every last prostitute of all ages, shapes and sizes with hungry eyes. Delwar eyed them derisively, they were everybody you’d expect to be around in your daily lives. That cute friend of yours from class, that kindly ‘uncle’ from the fourth floor, auto-rikshaw drivers, the house electrician. They all stood together, shoulder to shoulder, class and caste forgotten, united in the face of lust, all moistening the glum hookers with longing filled gazes.

Nipa was drenched when she walked in from the downpour outside. It was the first rain of a long summer, and she was happy, and happier still that her client and lover was here. They pretended to be complete strangers until they were behind locked doors, and spared no instant in clasping themselves hungrily on to each other. They made love while the rain outside colored the world a deeper shade of green washed clean of soot, dirt and summer sweat. They made love while the tipper tapper of rain drops played like a ritualistic drum beat celebrating their youthful passion. Nipa never ceased to amaze Delwar with how well she pleased him, how mischievously she teased him with her touch and left him aching by the time they were done. She clung to him, affectionately tracing lines with her fingers across his body while he stroked her hair and stared into her deep brown eyes, caressing her moist hair.

She was just like that much awaited summer rain to him.  No matter how fake he knew her show of affection was and how good she was leeching tips out of him, she was still his reprieve from his darkest moments. Just the way she’d be for thousand other people who’d be willing to pay her that very day. In a world of fake smiles and faked orgasms, relief is life is transient like Dhaka’s summer rain. Yet there was much to cherish in it.

Delwar’s phone rang, he stretched over to answer it while Nipa brushed over him and began putting her clothes back on. He eyed her brown petite frame while taking the call from his wife. As his young wife tried to engage him in innocent chatter, he felt aware and amused of his ‘sinfulness’ and how he was on that bed, remorselessly very much one with life that brimmed and mutated within this city.

[shoumikmuhammed]

Lines

(This story also got published on glyphstories.com: http://glyphstories.com/portfolio/lines/) 

“He was young when we met.” He said. Trembling at his own words. “He was eleven. We were casting for a TV Show in Palm Springs.”

The one before him with legs crossed some feet ahead upon the simulated woodgrain hardwood floor which looked more a shade of dark orange in the room’s scarce illumination. It was more like one of the classic interrogation room sets where the walls were invisible.

“And?” the one asked. Bradley Stone, the client of this strange heavily jacket clad character could not tell who or what he was dealing with.

From a distance the slightness of frame would make you think it’s a woman. A really thin woman who looked more like a stick diagram  with a voice of a man. Yet something about her seemed feminine. Maybe it was the deftness of her motion, her grace of her movement as she had led him in (He was far more comfortable with the idea of a She rather than a He, or worse, an It).

“His mom brought him in. She wanted him cast for the show real bad.” He said “Oh Lord, she wanted it bad, her kid on TV. Her darling, her precious, her little heartbreaker.”

He laughed. A cold cruel laugh. “Scrawny little Texan bitch.” He growled. “Was willing to fuck for it.”

He scratched his nose and went on as the woman watched him through her thick black shades which he had no idea why one would wear indoors at night.

“Her and that pink low cut blouse flaunting her oiled cleavage. Poor, broke. But you could tell she was a rich man’s kid. Definitely high school cheer leader. Probably fled home with a jock and lived to regret it. And now, she was here to push her son into what had been her dream of being in showbiz. Her son. Living her dream and she was at my trailer, willing to sell her body to make it fucking happen. But no.”

He laughed again. The quick sly laugh where the upper half of his face leered.

“It was the kid I wanted. Him, and that tiny frail frame. I wanted to watch those rosy cheeks caving in with my cock in his mouth. I wanted to claw his tiny ass while he vacuumed my pole.”

And He laughed again. “It took some talk. My way or the fucking high way. She begged. She pleaded. Turned to leave. But came back the next day. Not as dolled and moist as the day before, with her son at her side and her sunny demeanour just gone..”

He threw raised his hands and popped open his fists..

“disappeared, poof..” he said. “Bermuda fucking triangulated.”

He didn’t know why, or How he found himself pouring his innermost secrets out at her cues. Yet, he couldn’t hold back.

“Then I had him. Nice kid Shy one. Learned real quick.” Said Bradley Stone. “I’m sure his mother showed him some tricks, that sly cunt.” He laughed. “Frankly, the boy that walked in with his stiffened angry whore of a mother was nothing.” His face broke into a twisted grin. “The real star was made that day. The one who walked out and went home after I had my piece of that tiny ass.”

The woman quietly nodded, beckoning him to continue. Stone had begun trembling again.

“From then on, I took him in under my wings.” He said, his face becoming increasingly contorted. “Taught him everything I knew. Landed him roles before he was eighteen. Got him people begging for his signatures. Put him on the big screen.” His trembling was near convulsive now.

“And now..” The woman finally spoke “You want him destroyed.”

“I made him who he is.” Said Bradley Stone. “I fucking made him what he is. Without me, he is nothing.”

“What is it he did?” the strange woman asked him.

Stone was tempted to answer but right then he realized what he was dealing with here was forces beyond his explanation, beyond his control. And hour ago, all of this felt like a joke, but there was something about his surroundings. Something about the environment, outside and inside him. Something he couldn’t quite place. Or blame his age for, or alcoholism. He was sober, yet the peripheries of room seemed to be ringing with laughter from thousand miles and years away. The room felt as if it was moving, alive. Keenly encircling him from behind the impenetrable shadows.

Fuck this. Though Bradley Stone. Must have taken the wrong dosage again.

“No Bradley Stone you are not hallucinating.” Said the woman.

Yes. The woman. Far stranger than what he felt. Something about her struck chords inside him chilling him to the bone. To the plain eye, she was nothing more than a woman overdressed for Spring but something was wrong. Something felt wrong.

“I asked you..” said the woman with that strange deep voice. “What is It that he did that you claim your vengeance.”

Bradley Stone, director, producer, artist leaned forward. Wanted to tell her to go fuck herself. Knew something, some spell, some witchcraft was making himself spill his gut. But. No, he caved in.

He burst into tears.

“He was mine.” He said. “Mine. Mine and mine alone, that piece of shit. Knocked up this bitch, put a bun in her oven and now he comes up to me at the Emmies and says ‘Bradley. This is where we draw lines. I am sorry’ “. He sobbed into his hands and then raised his head, sniffing angrily he went on “ ‘Lines? You son a bitch, just because you’re all over Hollywood, you think you’re something now? Without me, you would be NOTHING more than a back alley drat eating his whore mom’s pussy every other night for some cents.’ And that cunt, he says ‘I’ve paid my dues Bradley. And here I am. The real Nobody is you. You’re some washed up has-been, a one hit wonder. The only thing that kept you on the saddle was having ME, yes Me at your helm. Count your blessings now old man. You and I are through’. Then he walked up and left.”

He sobbed on, for nearly twenty minutes as the woman quietly sat and watched. As he recovered, he looked into where eyes should have been.

“How did you find me.” She asked.

“A very satisfied customer.” He said. “I don’t know how you did what she asked of you, but she was pleased. Said strange things about you. Confided in fact. Because she thought people will call her crazy.”

He laughed an uncomfortable laugh.

“I mean, who in the world would believe that you’re over seventy thousand years old.” And laughed again. And this time she joined in, and they laughed until sheer discomfort brought him into a pause.

“I will pay whatever you want.” He said, with his voice seeping with urgency. “What ever it takes. For you to destroy him, utterly, and decisively.” He said back with his eyes at the ceiling.

“I also want him crying over his dead child.” He said quietly. “For there is no greater sorrow than that.”

The woman finally took her shades off. Her eyes were red. Red Lenses. He thought. Her skin had strange marks around the eyes. Tattooes which could have been runes but they looked more like scars.

“What is it you do, this witchcraft?” He asked. “Hey..” he said almost apologetically, “No, I am not accusing you of being a fake. Well, yeah, maybe, but what matters it, you get it done. The whole showy…what do you call it..Dogma..is good. Good for business indeed. You know, the people, gullible, idiotic will always flood in to have their lightning hurled from above facilitated. But hey, I appreciate what it is you do. You so called, whatever the fuck it is. What are they really? Coercion through Targeted Deception?”

She stood and dug a hand hand deep into her pockets and brandished what looked like a Jade Knife. She slipped off her robes, went stark naked and turned around.

She was a monstrosity to behold, yet strangely Bradley Stone felt a rising bulge between his legs. She was scarred and hideous. Her back was the hairiest he had seen on a woman. And as she bent down and her crack showed, it seemed to be a lot more so and as black as charcoal. She drove the knife into the Woodgrain floor and made grooves in there, slowly dragging them across, drawing some sort of a patter. Bradley Stone was feeling a growing arousal as he watched her. Her disfigured face, her daunting red eyes, her frail and withered naked frame riddled with hair and scars. Strangely, the scars seemed to be in an odd pattern.

“Who did that to you.” He asked her. She didn’t reply, just went on drawing the grooves and slowly chanting a hymn. In a strange language. Brdley Stone spoke five language and the one she spoke was none of them.

“Why do you do this.” He asked again.

When she was done she rose and said. “Because I can.”

Bradley Stone could swear he saw a light in those eyes. Flickering and fading but too boastful to be held back.

“Name your price, Bradley Stone.” Said she.

Stone was struck by how she knew his name given she hadn’t told her so, or announced he was coming, and the fact that he was disguised. Wrapped in mufflers, a Buffalos cap and shades.

“Actor Louis Mansfield’s fiancé will spontaneously abort and will be struck barren. And their marriage will fail. She will leave him and he will seek shelter in booze, drugs, and men. As that comes to light, he will lose his fans.He will be too proud to come seek your shelter. His career will take a downward spiral, and he will on one of these days, be found dead. Mutilated in a gay bar.”

Bradley Stone was sweating profusely as she turned to him and said “He will by dying every moment each day starting this moment, and his death..” She now went past him. He felt a touch of her skin against his arm and felt a prick of winter seizing his bones ”..Shall be slow. Excruciating.”

“Anything. I will pay anything.” He said, realizing no matter how much over the years he had refused to believe in things above explanations, he had no luxury of that notion now. He knew she was nothing ordinary. He knew he had dreamt of all she just said. This is how he wanted things to end for Louis Mansfield.

“Anything?” she asked him.

“Fuck yes.” He laughed a harsh laugh picturing pictures of Mansfield all over the papers and websites. Headlines about a star broken beyond repair.

The grooves had been finished, she drew lines connected them. It was a vast circle of patterns within patterns, wheels within wheels. There was a small empty space in the centre of it all, just ahead of the chair on which sat Bradley Stone. A small internal circle only large enough for two feet. Her feet will the spot and she stood right in front of him.

He came here angry and disbelieving, yet keen for a chance, even a slim one. Now he shivered. She was bare inches away from him. Her frail bare body. He was afraid. He was aroused. He was curious. He looked into her eyes, as if hoping for approval. She was impassive, yet he reached out and delved into her crotch. He fiddled round the hair but found nothing. Nothing but a pungent smell of sulphur at her proximity.

“Every sacrifice has one thing in common.” She said. “It requires..” she crouched down near him. “Fluids.”

He felt immobile as she unzipped his pants and began rubbing his manhood.

“Very ancient and fundamental witchcraft.” She said in her man’s voice. He felt less and less sure of what she really was. “Insulting rather. But had to resort to them since I lost my powers. But it’s the cost that bothers me. The toll it takes. It’s hard to keep that low profile.”

Her skin was unduely rough. Her scars where dense and they scratched him as she rubbed. Small cuts came to be.

“Your blood sustains you. It feeds your body but your seed carries in it millions of lives left to chance. Millions of vessels that could have carried souls. But the seed is life itself.”

Stone had heard about semen used in rituals in ancient times and today. Even recently there was a scandal involving sex workers in Abuja. They sold fresh semen from their customers left in used condoms to cult pagans in the vicinity.

His pole was extending slowly. He closed his eyes and saw a young Louis Mansfield at the age of thirteen in his trailer, jerking him.

“Slowly boy,” growled Mansfield. “Stop for ten seconds.”

The young boy went on doing it fast. He knew the director wouldn’t dare hit him because they were on a break and his pretty face would be needed on the next take. He grinned mischievously as he rubbed on. The director’s rage was slowly building. He let the kid do what he had to.

After their shooting was done for the day, the kid would spend a week in a hospital and three more limping from rectal pain.

The sorceress, the witch, the illusionist, or whatever she was, was now jerking him harder. Hurting him with her scarred hands, he felt himself bleed a little near the tip. It stang. He asked her to slow down but she went on.

“Lord Shiva would take his seed from his linga, which smelt of blue lotus and he would drink them like nectar and bask in its power.” She said.

He couldn’t tell if this was to disgust him enough to make him not come too fast because she was enjoying it or just for the show. Drama and Dogma. He thought.

In his mind’s eye he was in a lush suite at the Hilton in Rio some ten years ago. The twenty two year old Louis Mansfield now a hulking six foot tall man, ripped like a Hollywood rising star should be yet powerless before him. Bradley Stone sat back, sated from a long hour and watched the younger one. His toned moist physique glimmering in the lights. What had once been reluctance had turned slowly into acceptance. A long investment that had paid off.

“The greatest thing in mantra recitation and sadhana is the outflow of semen and vaginal emission. The powerful sadhaka, following the rule, should offer the augmented substance to the yoni region after mixing the semen and yoni tattva together.”

Bradley Stone threw his head back. Rapture beginning to claustrophobically close in. He wanted to delay it, so it would go on a little longer.

“To the Etoro tribe, semen was what made the men strong. So did Gnostic Christians who predate the Catholic by many centuries. To them  semen was the core indegredient for the Sacramental Wine of The Communion.”

He had an urge to grab her by her hair and drive her mouth onto his pole, but strangely, as if she knew his thoughts, she dutifull cupped her lips over it. He felt sharp teeth. More like fangs. What is she? He thought. He watched her eye him in rapture. He watched those red eyes glow. Like water gushing through a tunnel into the opening, he exploded. He moaned, and lay back. His legs felt numb. He gushed like a waterfall into her mouth and went on and on and one for minutes. She was vacuuming him. He felt some stinging in his veins down there. He hadn’t come like ever. Not even while he had himself up Louis Mansfield. He couldn’t tell if the growing numbness in his pole was a ruptured artery.

She took her mouth off as he watched drops of blood trickling off his tip. He watched her throat rhythmically expand and contract as she swallowed his seed. She rose and gracefully walked back into the centre of the strange mesh of patterns and lines she had created. As blood trickled down from his penis, Bradley Stone watched aghast as the lines seemed to shift.The scars in her body seemed to flow like shadows onto each other and change patterns like smoke. She twirled around and threw out her hands and writhed and twisted like a serpent in some strange rapturous agony.

“I was a God once to a nation,” she said. Her deep, man’s voice still unsettling him. “No, not a real God. But a mimic. A creation ensnared by the power He had over those who would believe.”

She went on spinning like a top. The patterns went around her matching her speed like planets went around the Sun.

“Every morning thousands of men would release themselves onto a sacred pit and a virgin would be thrown into the deep well. She would have to consume all the refuse by sundown. Or die trying. In turn I would grant them fertile land. Fine Men.”

She spread out her arms like wings.

“In another aeon, I was a Godess to a forest Tribe. And another, to Indian villagers. I was a manifestation of their deepest and darkest desires. I, the blood and cum soaked beacon in the darkness of their oblivion, I was the one in the middle of thousands lying prostrate before and voicing their prayers to…but alas, mankind would rise slowly and agonizingly like hardening manhood filling with blood…”

Somewhere, thousand miles away at an expensive restaurant, a beautiful couple clinked wine glasses holding hands until the woman felt a strange pain. She reached down and watched her beautiful white cocktail dress drenched in blood. She let out a horrified shriek as Louis Mansfield eyed her completely aghast as he quickly dialed 911.

“Man’s rise as pushed our kind to the less visible peripheries, like the walls of this room. Us, the other creations of God. Beings of Fire He chucked away like garbage because you Filth of the Earth before whom so many of us rose to overthrow Him by pretending to be Gods. Yet we were forgotten, erased as told. And so many of us shunned why the rest of our kind are now living amongst you…muses and succubi…beings of flesh, slaves of man because we want to bask in glory just like you do..and our need to be appreciated as our Lord refused to has led us from thrones to shackles…”

By now, Louis Mansfield lay weeping in a hospital corridor while his fiancé howled in the Operation Theater.

The Djinn crouched on the floor like a tigress eyeing the sated and dazed Bradley Stone as she came closer.

“I was robbed of my powers and here is where I am now, living by lowly witchcraft for lowly souls like yourself, sating and devouring..” she crouched closer..

“It’s done.” He said. His mind’s eye watching a devastated Louis Mansfield. That ungrateful little shit who left him for some sorority slut. He was finished now.

“And now..the price..” said the Djinn, edging closer and closer.

Bradley Stone grinned. “Any fucking thing you want..”

In a fraction of a second her hand was inside him, groping in his chest cavity. Blood splattered the rough woodgrain floor as she ripped out his heart.

“I haven’t fed for weeks..” she said as she sank her teeth into his beating heart and spit out the heartstrings chewing it rapturously as Bradley Stone stared with his vision slowly dimming..

He watched everything blur and fade into thin lines between the rays of light, her lanky frame and the lines she drew on the floor. Frail Lines between sanity and the rapturous depths of orgasmic high, lines between man and beasts. Frail and weak like the young boy he mutilated so gladly. Weak and welcoming, lines were ever there man to penetrate, to desecrate, to complicate and violate..always haunting and taunting like the red light in her eyes.

[shoumikmuhammed]

Jerk Off

“You will be amply compensated.” I remembered those words whispered into my ear. In that crisp and slick accent as I felt the cold touch of a gun against my head. “Now drive. As fast as you can.”

And here we were. Some billionaire. Crazy as fuck brought me all the miles up here onto the top of a towering edifice looking at the city. It didn’t take me long people were hot on his heels. He literally shed layers of Armani along the way for the sake of stealth. And here I was watching a grown man jerk off the edge of the building. Peeing from there would have seemed a lot more normal. All the semen would probably just be blown back on to this side off the railing thanks to the wind.

“This, my friend is freedom. Freedom you all cry for, and run from every day as you live your lives caged.” He shouted against the wind. “Caged within your laws, your decrees, your need for affiliation.”

He must have probably felt a slight limpness coming as he jerked harder. Harder than could be comfortable to watch.

“Careful dude…you’re doing it too rough!” I shouted. “dude, you could like..bleed or something!”

“Why don’t you just come here and do it too!” He shouted jovially. “Dude?” he turned to look at me wearing a wry half grin with a slight contortion from the effort of the open air jerk off.

“I am good.” I told him.

Some twenty two minutes ago I was scared for my life. Some twenty two hours ago I was tired of it. Sore from the rush of days that flew by, I had injured my hand while punching an ATM booth when I found out I was low on cash for the booze. And then this suited and booted Mr American Psycho here takes my cab. Holds me at gun point and nicely asks to leave town.

You never really know how much you love a much hated life until it takes a page out of your wife’s book the moment before she walked out of your door. The moment she stopped and looked back. Waited for you to say something. To do something to make her change her mind. You have a couple of options at that very moment. You either do what you’re supposed to. Treat a lady right. Shed a few tears, mutter a few apologies. Or you do what I did and ask her to kindly close the door behind her after she left.

Sad part about lives. Unlike wives, you don’t really see how close to the door they are, or how far past.

“Hey. You know, I won’t really be this free for long. They’ll be here any minute.” Shouted Mr Furious Masturbator. I was more keen to know how could he go on jerking so long rather than who would be chasing him. “I’ll tell you who I am.”

I just sat down by him on the railing. His gun lay forgotten. I had a slight temptation to weigh his theory of freedom by shooting myself. Then I wondered what he’d do next. And how that’d suck if someone weren’t around to watch it. His orgasm was rather sudden. A spew of white lava pierced the night air and rocketed down long path to the busy streets below. Mr Manchild laughed hysterically.  His action would cost someone millions in insurance if the cum landed on some sportscar. The chances were not so low on this side of town. Something like that would literally make Mr Milk the Lizard a literal rainmaker.

When he was done, he simply sat down on the railing by me.

“Nice ain’t it.” I asked him. Our past tension of one being on the wrong end of gunpoint for over an hour clearly superficially forgotten. He nodded while closing the fly.

“You” he said. “are a good man.”

“Well.” I said. “I know some saints in that case if you were looking for some.”

I didn’t know he’d get the joke but he did laugh.

“Cum holes are what my old man hoped would chain me to him.” He said. “Keep me locked till I was ready. Booze. Men. Women. Red lights.” He laughed. “A complicated relationship we’ve had over the years.”

The quiet ones must always make the best shrinks. I guess that’s what they believe.

“You see,” says Mr Sudden Philosopher, “the world is hell of a lot bigger when you look at it from confined spaces. The sky is more vast when you stare at it smothered and trampled beneath a crowd. The moon feels a lot closer when seen through foliage in a dense forest.”

Sirens. Police cars. Who the fuck is this guy?

“The seas and horizons feel endless when scanned through windowpanes.”

“So is jerking off from the top of an edifice some way of reaching out to that distant, illusory stretched out expanse that beckoned from beyond?” I ask him. He shrugs.

Helicopters are audible from a distance. I feel a numbness in my gut. Am I some hostage? Who is this guy? A spy? A criminal?

“Well.”  He says. “Jerking off the top is me saying fuck you to everything down below just how God does to the likes of you. Creates you flawed and imperfect and thus within all of you he spawns madness only to stamp his authority. Paints mortality, famine and disease onto your fates to show who’s the boss. Worst of all, just to fuck it up for you lot, he throws my dad into the mix. Yeah well, not like my dad liked it either when he was cast out and tempted Eve and had the whole lot of you down here…He hates his job you know, my dad does. He doesn’t enjoy it in the slightest. After all, he knows his war with God is nothing but a lost cause with a illusion of his triumph as the days draw to a close.

The helicopters were now visible from a distance. The noise made it tougher to hear, not that it made sense anyway. I shouted “What?”

“oh,” he smiled, bemused. I forgot to tell you.

“You will need to scram after you hear this.” He said. “You may think I am crazy, but I assure you I am not.”

“Right, of course you are not!” I bellowed over the copter sounds. I threw furtive glances. What is this guy? Serial public wanker with a thing for scriptures? But high profile enough for police activity this dense? I prepared myself to run when I had to.

He laughed as if he could tell what I thought. “You won’t live if they find you. After all. They are here for me. They are watching over me. It is after all, premature for me to be out. The world is not prepared.”

He grabbed my arm. “Take the fireplace when you run but first let me tell you. This is me tasting my few minutes freedom and doing what I was forbidden. This is me taking a bite of the apple of eden, this is me refusing to bow as told. I shall tell you who I am. I am the Anti-Christ. I am the Beast of The Apocalypse.  I, like you am a slave to my destiny. Chained to fate, shackled to Inevitability. I know my fate and yours.”

I tried to tug myself free.

“I knew you were trouble when you walked in!” I piped. Bad time for a joke. His face contorted in fury.

“Freedom is not knowing the future. This is what spawns so many futures instead of one. Freedom is not knowing what you are and what agony your destiny shall be to bring. What suffering you shall inflict. Freedom is not knowing how you shall meet your gruesome end. Freedom is what you all so lovingly cry out for, you never stopped to realize, the wings of an angel are nothing more than mere chains forged from light and embellished in colours. Freedom is the power to split one future into millions without being chained to one destiny.”

“Hey!” I told him. “You need some help.” I jerked my arm free. I saw a growing black cloud in his face. I saw his confinement hover lifelessly behind those eyes.

“Why are telling me all this?” I asked him.

He turned his eyes back skywards. The helicopters had apparently found him and was rushing towards us. He gave me one last look and said “You just happened to be at the right time at the right place. Now go.” He waved and gave me a hint of a smile as I ran for the fire exit. The helicopters hovered nearer and nearer and I hoped against hope I wouldn’t be found if he were serious about me not making out of this alive.

The next morning, as I headed for work, I stopped near the building where I happened to be the night before. There was no trace of the increased police activity. No news or whispers of what happened. I stopped by the ATM booth and decided to fish out some spare change for the day.

Whoever it was I met last night, whether he was just some lunatic or the Antichrist wasn’t kidding when he said “You will be amply compensated”.

[shoumikmuhammed]

Blue

Words were lost to him.

And he couldn’t blame himself for it. That’s what art did to anyone when they tried to formulate a description for something so perfect. Crafted, honed and nurtured to create something he wouldn’t have dreamed of, and it was all his to enjoy before it fell from grace. It saddened him as he pondered upon the temporarity of things. How the most coveted of things withered away in the blink of an eye, mercilessly leaving a gaping hole inside. A massive black hole so heavy that even light would crumble in the gravity of its darkness. Right now, it mattered not. She was all his to smother with his undying, locked away and bottled up passion from the sleepless weeks. He buried his face in her neck, losing himself in the touch of her cold skin. His fingerprints were still very agonizingly clear over her throat……yet, he tried to ignore them, tried to slip past the shadows that were beginning to clog up the warmth that had been coursing through him, tried to wipe clean the past three hours from his head, tried not to see himself as who his conscience (or the remains of one) told him he was.

He knew there wasn’t enough time, her body was already beginning to go rigid and the flies increasingly beginning to become a nuisance. Yet he tried to see past that and get on with what he had wanted to do for so long. As he went in, he realized he had never felt so alive. Not with the girl before this one, and that girl’s mother before her. It was a shame that this elation was so short lived. The best thing that you can ever do is take what comes to you. Because, time flies.

He first saw her while she was at Lacrosse practice in the school grounds the day he was hired as their History teacher. Then he began seeing her often at classes. A lively fourteen year old, blonde haired and blue eyed. Deep inside he knew that he had to have her. His body craved hers, and the craving gave in to an unnamed agony which cost him his sleep, his appetite, and like every pangs of desire he had felt before this, it cost him his sanity. Obsession tore him to pieces. There were moments in the class room when she stood or sat near to him and he felt his heart smash the daylights out of him. He stammered, he faltered, he got the dates and names from the text wrong, sweating profusely despite snowfall. He told himself that it’d pass, the darkness that was killing him slowly and mercilessly. But once again, that darkness was winning, leaving him cowering before its sick twisted grin, utterly defeated.

There was no greater sorrow than loneliness….not so easily quenched for one who could barely bring himself to talk to a woman. It was so much easier when they’d just shut it and gave him wanted, without complaining about how quickly he’d be spent. It felt so much easier when they didn’t struggle and just stayed still when he had his way…

Silence and stillness were the virtues he prized above all others, only brought by a foreplay of Death. He had looked in her eyes as he watched life fade from them as he choked her with his bare hands….Eyes as blue as the inside of the oceans he so often saw on TV….it was beautiful how sunlight from the outside altered the intensity of its colour…..the colour of her eyes reminded him of that.

When he was done, he hauled himself out of the incinerator, sated and rejuvenated. Closing the lid he gave her one last look and sighed to himself. It was a shame there was no other way he’d have it. There was no other way to keep them still without killing them first before he had his way. Now that she was rigid from rigor mortis, and he was done with her. It was a shame it had to end there. He flicked on the gas and watched the flames slowly crawling up the gauze and took the moments to admire her for one last time. Burning her away slowly, the darkness shrank away like a sleepy cat sated from a full belly.

Her skin was now a greyish shade of blue.

What a lovely colour on her it was!

[shoumikmuhammed]

Home Coming

(Here’s another piece I did a while back around the end of 2011 or early 2012, in a more formative phrase as a writer. This shit is bit too simple  but yeah, a crucial evolving point for me)

The winds outside howled in harmony with blaring sirens, the skies danced a ballad for the fallen angels, as the rain came down in sheets. It was hard to see anything from a window. The city was a blurred view and the world outside was a raging beast. Howling, Berserk, like a loud choir of wolves outside the door, encircling and anticipating an apprehensive prey, while not refraining from making their presence known with it’s music. The Clouds stood ground like a merciful veil from the wrathful skies. It didn’t seem to let the sky go black but leave it stuck at some weird mix, as if it couldn’t decide between black and some seriously constipated shade of gray. It shat rain and thunder.

He’d be home anytime now.

And wouldn’t be expecting  her. And it had been long enough. Karen was done waiting. It had taken her months of waiting, waiting  and contemplating to reach this decision. Her mind had never been clearer. The rehab had seen to it. Three months sober. An achievement to wear like a crown. The living room was a mess when she got here. And that was a relief. She was sick of the infuriating cleanliness of  St Clancy’s. That smell of antiseptics had become an allergy she still couldn’t adapt to. It doesn’t matter now she thought. There was no place like home. No place like that shithole filled with the most dreaded memories that felt like icy stabs with every step. So much had happened while she was here all hung over and climaxed after she was dragged off to a correctional facility. Here she could do whatever she liked. This place wasn’t  sharp-object-proofed like St Clancy’s to stop her stabbing herself.  Suicidal tendencies?? Guilty as charged, since life wasn’t really appealing.  But there were things to be done before she did herself in.

She broke her abstinence from alcohol as she helped herself to some warm beer in a hot tub while she also chain smoked her lungs out. The cravings were never easy to shrug off. She didn’t want to be sober. There was no point. She had blown her opportunity when it was necessary for her to do so, if not for herself. The realization was a darkness that had been scything her to pieces for several weeks. The regrets wrapped itself like a hungry serpent around her and began to constrict rendering her breathless. She gasped….It had been a while since she let the tears flow. Apparently, the warmth of the tub had her all softened up. Fighting the lump in her throat, she tried wiping them away. No, she had to be strong to do what she came to do. She tried her best to silence the poison of grief that gripped her.

She crept into Sandy’s bedroom. Sandy was her fourteen year old daughter. Two months dead from an amphetamine overdose. The feds declared that to be a suicide.  And they couldn’t be more wrong.

She had such a great life ahead of her….Karen thought, watching her accepting the first prize trophy for a painting she painted for her high school art contest, a deceitful smile on her face which refused to give away  the pain she had had to live with, yet those eyes did not lie. They shone in optimism brought on by her aspirations, her hopes and dreams of escaping this nightmare

….I took them away from her…as  I took her away from them….I killed her….

Oblivion is a bliss until the consequences of ignorance leaves you with nothing to live for. What’s left of your life becomes a terror too much to behold when you’re trying to think past the suffering. You feel like you’ve hit some sort of a dead end inside a tunnel with its walls closing in. A suffocating darkness that you could only escape, for the time being, by a hang-over. Yet the darkness would return in the inevitable (although limited)  hours of lucidity.

Pain is a lot easier to live with than guilt.

No one knew who Sandy’s father was. Not even Karen who was hung over when she conceded. Sandy was an unplanned accident. But Karen never loved her less….she just didn’t have what it took a woman to mould herself into an ideal role model. The willingness, the guts, and the necessary restraint. There was no way she could give up the booze, all the dope and the orgies. She tried to keep that life a secret but little things gave you away. It was just a matter of time till Sandy knew. The anguish began, not for the first time, to devour Karen, killing her slowly as she remembered all those broken promises made by her to rectify. All those counseling  sessions with a shrink . The string of affairs, until it went out of hand quashing a senator’s white house hopes as especially intimate photos of him and Karen in her bedroom hit the headlines on tabloids all over the state.

Then, she met Jeffrey. A possible turning point seemed to be inevitable when they moved to his place. A much needed relief from their nomadic living and much needed father figure for Sandy.

But, unfortunately, nothing is what it seems.

The signs had been very vague, but still there to be seen. Over the months, Sandy began to become distant and more self absorbed, even absent minded at time. Always awfully quiet in Jeffrey’s presence. They’d avert eyes.  Sometimes, it would seem (now facilitated by twenty out of twenty hindsight) that Sandy was afraid to talk in his presence. It was hard to keep track for Karen. While, in her knowledge, Jeffrey was a busy paralegal, busy most of the time, out of town every now and then, Karen hadn’t really been busy being the most faithful partner. Her late night outs, overly frequent ‘book club gathering’s (and hundred other excuses for her ventures) never seemed to stir much of a reaction more than a smile and a “Have fun, pumpkin!”.

She never had the time to realize that Jeffrey hadn’t been much of a Jesus of the Suburbia himself.

Back at St Clancy’s, Karen was allowed to check her email once in about three days. There was an email from Sandy the day she was found dead. An email with an attached video file shot on Sandy’s webcam.. Karen had smiled at the thought of the rebuking,mood-swing-filled and brutally honest nature of her daughter (in written or texted messages and skype conversations rather than in real life, up front where she was rather shy) .When she clicked ‘play’, it buffered. Her daughter blinked out at her from the screen. Her face was pale and gaunt with what seemed to be an attempt at a smile.

“Surprise!!!!F.Y.I: Im jacked up on pills, that’s probably why It ain’t so tough to word some stuff that I have so much trouble sayin’. I recorded and mailed this cause cause this is probably the last time we really get to connect. Didn’t want that to be just stale ass text. Didn’t see you when those bitches dragged you off. They don’t let me visit. And I don’t know when you’re comin’ home”

There was something ominous about the unusually cheery high pitched voice in which she was speaking. Not to mention the part where Sandy said “The last time we connect”.

“Im just about to go over some …umm…..future plans you could say….didnt skype with you cause you’re definitely gonna say no…”

That didn’t sit well with Karen. Her anxiety deepened because Sandy had just burst into tears on the screen. In a choked voice she went on:

“Jeffrey is a bastard,mom. A sick, demented, swinehumping bastard !! I’m sorry I’ve kept you from this for so long….He screws me,mom!!He’s been doing that for ages…wayyy before you left. Seemed so nice at first, even hooked me up with some ecstasy one day, we’d get high on the couch every now and then….one day, he starts touching….told me it was okay, that it’d be our secret, that you should never find out! I wanted to shrug that off, but he started hitting me with a belt and told me that he’d kick you out and we’d be out living in the streets once again, after he’d taken our place away with all those legal-whatever-the-fuck-he-does if I didn’t do what he asked me too. Made me do some sick things mom……He should die, mom….and go straight to hell and fast!!”

Karen had gone pale, and her breathing was strained. She couldn’t tell what gripped her with greater strength, Shock or Disbelief. Sandy couldn’t be lying. Her brain registered what was going on, but she was lost for responses…frozen, paralyzed, petrified, transfixed from the shock.

“I’ll most likely be dead by the time you get this. I don’t know when your’e getting out and coming back….I can’ go on this way. He’s posted videos of us having sex on the internet. When I’m school, everyone’s…like.. staring and whispering shit about me….like, I’m some slut…Mr. Jones confronted me the other day and said that I can forget about ever going to Yale…I’m done for, mom….I can’t live with this….I can’t take it….I can’t stand him, I can’t stand that friend of his who’s always coming over for a three way” then she wiped her tears  and went on “…don’t worry about me,mom, I’ll have gone off to a better place. Even hell’s a lot better than here.”

Karen had finally burst into panic stricken sobs….

“Mom, he must never find out that you got this…..I don’t want him kicking you out when he gets back….I have to sign off now…just….get well soon, and get a better somebody…….I love you mom, I’ll miss you loads!!”

And Jeffrey never did find out about that video. Either way, despite the fact that it could’ve been used as evidence at court to successfully convict him, Karen chose to put the Feds out of what was her fight. She never really liked the police and the media. They didn’t give a shit about justice. They were more busy with parking tickets, busting druggies and a senators’ one night stands. Freedom, Honor and Justice are just metaphysical elements people aspire to in the name of progress. You can’t run a country without bantering and deluding the masses about what can never  be perfectly achieved for everybody. People couldn’t live their lives without considering themselves unbound whereas no one really was so. Karen had nothing to lose. No one would give a shit about a junkie like herself. And now here she was, back home….waiting. Waiting for a long overdue apology, waiting for closure that Jeffrey’s condolence calls before her daughter’s funeral (where she couldn’t be to witness his ‘heart wrenching’ eulogy) couldn’t provide.

Now, she was glad that she’d held on to the spare keys to this apartment. Jeffrey never knew that she’d had some of  those made ages ago when she was seeing someone else and usually had to sneak out late at night and come back before dawn.

It was about around eight when he got back.

And he was absolutely flabbergasted when he found her in the Living room.

“Karen….”he muttered with a look of unmistakeable panic which he moulded into a look  of surprised delight. “They finally let you out!!”

She stood up and let him rush up to her and throw his arms around her. Reluctantly taking a peck on her lips, she eased out and sat back on the couch. Her eyes still locked on him.

“I’m so terribly sorry, pumpkin….” He said, considerably paler than he had been when he had walked in. “It was horrible. Horrible. Kids today….I don’t get how they come across all those stuff. After all we teach them about how dangerous drugs are…..horrible…”

Karen lit herself a cigarette and offered him one. He took so and gracefully lit hers.

“I should’ve known…you know, seen the signs….dug deeper and found out more about that boy she was seeing…”

He was sweating profusely.

It was pathetic to watch him defend himself like this. Karen had seen see-through strap ons a lot less revealing than Jeffrey’s shady attempts at a cover-up.

And that reminded her of home….of her own father. Reminded of how he tried to cover up the terrible things he had done to Karen when she was little. He threatened her that he’d stop loving her if she didn’t play along. Karen remembered how successfully his father carried their secret to his grave. She wondered how her mother (long alienated) had spent all those years waking up every morning next to that man without knowing what a monster he had been. She shuddered at the though of how similar a fate Sandy had inherited. It made her dizzy to comprehend the spiral of  despair that her existence was wrapped in. Karen had moved out at sixteen, had been imprisoned multiple times on drug possession, drug selling, political activism. She wanted another home away from the one that she was born to…..only travelling seven states over the years and finding one where her daughter ends up dead.  And right now listening to a very imptomptu  charade of lies. She decided it was time to cut to the chase.

“Were you screwing her, Jeff?”

A very awkward pause followed. A look of dawning realization gleamed in Jeffrey’s eyes….h e had realized there was no point arguing and lying. He was a man of logic when it came to situations involving one asking questions with a penetrating gaze that now Karen held him in. He was adversely cornered. He welcomed any quick ideas that a paralegal’s brain could churn out. A settlement was the first thing he considered her, his hunch was a million or so, but he’d start his negotiations at thirty grand.

“Sweety,” Karen said with a tearful smile that said she knew exactly what was going on inside his head “Why so…..confused??What is there to go so mousy??I didn’t come here for this….I don’t want this….Not your excuses….not your money..(Jeffrey almost sighed in relief)….just plain and simple truth. You owe it to Sandy. She went away all abashed and ashamed…..the least you could do to honor her memory is to at least just tell me the truth.”

Jeffrey was still trying to come up with an appropriate response. Karen was done waiting. She went up to him and seated herself on his lap. It helped him breathe easier until Jeffrey felt the edge of a kitchen knife pressed against his jugular. He knew he had to speak up. Death from a slit throat wasn’t a fun way to go. He began to stammer….

“Move and I’ll do it.” Said Karen coolly. “Answer my question, and I’ll walk away”…she moved her lips closer to his ear and whispered “ for once and for good.”

Jeffrey’s heart pounded madly…he was more used to being on the other end of similar situations whenever he was role playing with hookers, or as he had done so often with Sandy. A masochist not so used to being cornered so completely. He had absolutely no desire to die, not when his Firm was looking to crack a pharmaceutical scandal that would win them millions, not when he had so much awaiting him. He already had his eyes on a Bentley. Words wanted to come out, but the panic attack left him stammering.

“JUST TELL ME THE FUCKING TRUTH FOR ONCE!!!!”Bellowed Karen…

Jeffrey was twitching all over violently…”Yes, yes..” He gasped “I did it…we did it…..but Sandy was asking for it Karen….she begged me….she threatened that she’ll tell everybody that I raped her….”

“Isn’t that exactly what you did?”asked Karen, clearly impervious to the workings of a paralegal’s mind.

There was no answer to that. Jeffrey lowered his eyes in submission.”She seduced me, Karen…”he pleaded for one last time.

“Anything she did?or said? To lead you on, maybe??”  said Karen, the knife was pressed harder against Jeffrey’s throat.”Tell me…”

There was so much deception in this world…wasn’t home where you could be completely honest? Be yourself for once?…but could you? When there are all these soaring expectations weighing so heavy on your shoulders of being the ideal daughter (who’d keep shut about a father who’d screw her daily) and being a role model for a daughter (who lives with your sodomy)?? Could you ever be who you are? Could others be at peace with you? More importantly could you be at peace with yourself for once?

Jeffrey was about to open his mouth, but Karen was done with his honesty. She was done listening to what was probably the truth, but whatever that was it was too much. She didn’t want to spend rest of her life dwelling on Jeffrey’s last words. And yes, she had lied when she said she was going to walk away. She had lied to Jeffrey, not for the first time. And she knew that if he had been lying, it wouldn’t have been for the first time either, but certainly his last. She stabbed him squarely on his right shoulder. He screamed out in pain and  tried to shove her away. Karen took a swipe at his face. Mr. Jeffrey Harrelson, the paralegal was now officially blind in one eye. His screams had reached a feverish pitch, and there was  blood everywhere. She moved in and stabbed him in the gut…after a still twelve seconds, she let him free fall and then began hacking at him. Slicing his Adam’s apple open like a fresh fruit on a summer’s day. Slowly and steadily Jeffrey stopped struggling…and slowly, it ended. Another lifetime erased, another one’s dreams taken away as he was taken away from them, just the way he had done the same thing to someone else.

As life faded from his eyes, the last thing on his mind was Sandy. Her on top him, whispering to him, telling him no one will ever know their dirty little secret. Her promises of giving him what his wife couldn’t while she was locked away, or passed away in booze. Her young body pressed to his, lips softly nibbling at his ears. He could have it all, she told her, she was his, given that she gets what she wanted.

He saw the anger in her eyes when she threw a lamp at him out of anger when he told her she was not to leave home after she was arrested for posession of drugs he had paid for. He locked her away after he told her he was done providing for her need. He saw his colleague’s avert his eyes and being found on the internet in videos with Sandy. Videos he never knew she made. Yet he pushed on past slander and ridicule and clung on to his job.

All he wanted was to do the right thing, to undo his wrongs so he could break through guilt and resentment to a point when it wouldn’t matter. When his wife would come back sober and have a proper home, so Sandy could go to college. As he slowly found his senses fading and his breathing straining up, for a moment, he pictured all he wanted and all he was deprived. As his vision went watery, he could make out Karen slumping down on the couch sobbing herself sick. He wanted to comfort her, yet something else pulled him, a laughter of a young woman, he slowly gave in, dispersing like ripples into that laughter, a victim of a prank laughed at from beyond.

[shoumikmuhammed]

Beneath Her Black Wings

(photocredit:Bushman)

She wanted me to break it. “Your time is done.” She said with her hand outstretched for me to take.

I stared into those deep green eyes that told tales of green dales in mountaintops of far off worlds I had never known. Yet they beckoned me, haunted me, taunted me. My hands shook. I wanted to rise from a fetal position, bathed in her strange light.

“Come on now!” Said she. “Fear not!” With a laugh of a child she ushered me closer.

“There is no leaving this place.” I said. “Not for me.” I felt my throat clogged at words whence none had escaped me for centuries. “This is to be my abode.” I felt my stone eyes break into tears. “Till the end of time.”

She laughed again. That haunting laugh. The kind that brought life to barren land and brought rain to the solitary

dunes of a desert. It rang from where she was and echoed inside the cavern.

Her laughter was light. Her presence was light. She was light itself manifest. And light I had not known over the length of my self inflicted captivity. The light I had locked myself away from inside my own prison. The light that I refused to allow to penetrate my self torment.

“Poor silly little serpent!” she said. “Do you not see? The End is here!”

At those words I reared my head and began uncoiling slowly. The ground shook beneath after a disturbance it had not felt for the aeons in my waking slumber, I asked “Is it finally over?”

“Yes! It will be in a while!” She said. Still smiling the smile that melted steel that even the flames the dwarves raised could not.

“But why wake me?” I said. “Why ask me to rise now when the End would have done the same?

She had kindled the fire at the hidden head of the cavern only she could have found. She sat there idly juggling with its embers while clearly waiting for me to rise and stop talking.

“Because I wanted someone to be there to watch it with me.” She said.

And then I saw it. Behind that calming façade, behind that mesmerizing beauty, I saw a hidden agony.

I saw velvet skin hiding secret scars.

“Am I the only one alive?” I asked her.

“Yes, you are.” She said.

I rose and trudged. I broke the circle of blood I had drawn milleniae ago, and vowed never again to venture out of till my end came.

“Only for this moment?” I asked “Is that why you never came for me?”

She didn’t need to reply. All things were ending. All life was already gone. And she didn’t want to be the only one still waiting as everything came crashing down around her. She didn’t want to watch all the worlds end alone. Even angels were not immune to perishing as the clock struck and the horn was blown.

She didn’t want her end to be solitary.

She didn’t want her dying words unheard.

I slowly slithered out following her tiny footsteps. The cavern shook as my massive weight shifted from its depths. It began caving in. I took one last look at a small circle I had made on the ground milions of years ago as a mortal. A circle drawn in my own blood. A circle I was not to cross till the end of time. I watched the blood wiped through were I moved out of it. I watched what was once my chamber of heresy, crumble. I watched what was once my captivity go below rubble.

And I left it behind with the little girl prancing her way out of what was once a vast mountain onto a shore. The world was now a madman’s dream with a red sun engulfing half the skyline and a weeping moon. Landmasses had crumbled off the face of the earth and were afloat upon the skies. Entire cities were floating around like sand blown by a gale. Mankind has long met his demise and his remise once proudly flaunted were sad memnto’s humbled before nature which had now forgotten it’s own laws. Planets had forgotten their assigned paths around the sun and went on to gladly embrace each other loudly. You could see the exchange throwing of fireworks in the sky. Beautifully spreading out debris in concentric circles which came crashing to this world like waves on a shore. The Universe was caving in. Caving back into zero. Back into the nothingness it came from. Existence itself went into delirium, stars in a frenzy.

The little girl sat herself by the shore and I stopped settling down nearby.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she said watching the debris come down like a fiery rain upon the floating landmasses, which danced around in their own ballad denying gravity.

“How do you like your freedom, serpent?” she turned to ask me.

“I detest it.” I said. “For I have done nothing but walked out of one prison to another. Still powerless before fate.”

“Weren’t we always powerless?” She said.

“But you…”

She laughed. A bitter sad laugh.

“There was a woman in that sea in a stormy night about to give birth. She was dying.” She said. “I was there as usual, doing my job. Right by her side as her breathes dwindled to handfuls.”

I watched on to that point in the ocean, picturing her there. The shadow of her black wings cast on the waters.

“My orders came just as she brought her infant into the world. I asked God. Why? Why her? What shall become of this poor infant? It was the only time I ever questioned his orders. But He, the all knowing, did nothing but bade me do as told. Let the boy live and his mother die.”

I bowed my head, my eyes welled up again. I thought of my past sins and my towering arrogance. And here I was laid bare.

“That boy would go on to do great things. And horrible things. He would be a king. And his people would one day make him their God. And here we are now, Serpent Priest. Your sorcery no longer left you human. You would destroy lands and sacrifice your own populace because you sought to be more, so much more, and here we are.”

“Is this why you never came for me?” I asked her. “So you could come and tell me this now.”

“No.” She said. “I was given no orders to come for you. After all, I am only doing one’s bidding see?”

I have tried. Again and again to understand the grander scheme of things but the more I saw, the less I knew and more I found the more felt missing.

“Maybe this is what He wanted.” She said cheerily. “So I had someone to sit back with and watch the world end.”

“Like a companion?” I asked.

“I had always been your companion.” She said. “I have always been near you, around you, before you, behind you, beside you, harvesting the endless lives you took for blood to power your black rituals and heresies. I was there awaiting his order when you went mad from grief at the realization of your sins after your family killed themselves. I waited for his order. I watched you at the end of the cliff. I thought of you, just the way I thought of that infant on the plank. Your sins are not for me judge. I watched you walk away from the edge of that cliff into the catacombs to curse and seal yourself so you would let the remorse rip you to shreds till I came for you.”

“And you never did.”

“Well, He didn’t ask.” She said with a wink. “Maybe he knew this was what I wanted all along.”

[shoumikmuhammed]

Limp

The strokes were deliberate today, careful, immaculate, meticulous. Much too co-ordinated coming from a toe sticking out of a sock. I watched in awe as Travis sat there with a face contorted in undivided attention as he sketched upon a canvas with eyes narrowed and ears shut. He painted as if nothing mattered anymore. As I watched him sketched, time itself seemed to stop.

An hour had passed as he sat there trying to paint with his foot, but he did not know I had been watching him from the door. He did not know how it killed me to watch him like this everyday. Being a housekeeper, I was used to taking care of the old and the terminal and the insane. But this job, for some reason, was different. Nowhere in my contract was it was written that it would feel worse to watch young Travis Baker live his days caged by paralysis of his arms.

“It’s not a lot of work really,” Mrs. Baker had told me. It was not indeed. Travis took care of himself very well for a man who lost his arms shielding himself from a bomb blast in the slums of Iraq.

“It was a rescue mission.” His wife had told me the day I was hired. We were in the kitchen, and she sat across the yellow table. The clean cut, real estate saleswoman. Her brows were raised and eyes on the bridge of my nose. Attentive and curious she seemed as she asked about my past experience while telling me hers. I took furtive glances at her husband looking after whom was to be my job. I watched him sitting slouched in the living room couch with a cat gently purring on his lap as he stared into a television screen.

He would have been considered strikingly handsome if not for the long unkempt hair and an overgrown beard that would obscure his better features, He was pale, drawn and had clearly lost a lot of weight in a short span of time.

“He barely speaks.” Said Mrs. Baker. “He has been awfully quiet since he returned. This way.”

“Sandy.” Someone called out to her from upstairs.

Mrs. Baker reluctantly barked a reply as an almost naked man came down their stairs into the kitchen. He walked in and gave me a courteous nod before planting a kiss onto the cheek of a clearly abashed Mrs. Baker who had her eyes closed. The man took some milk from the fridge and walked by over to the sofa where sat Travis, still lifelessly fixated on the television as the man took the remote control and sat down beside Travis and changed the channel. There was a strange look on Mrs. Baker’s face. I could not tell if it was pity or remorse. Or both maybe.

Where Travis was inscrutable. As if his heart had gone as limp as his arm.

Mrs. Baker was clearly uncomfortable now. I gave her a nod of reassurance. I had seen worse. Although deep inside I felt a pang of guilt at my nod, as if I was justifying her actions.

There is no root of evil running deeper than the willingness to justify it.

Mrs. Baker was now keen to clear things up as quickly as possible as she told me about the hours, about the food, about anything else I needed to know and headed out. Here was my first day at the job in the home of a war hero robbed of his love and his life.

I quietly went about doing my work. Mrs. Baker and her lover was gone soon enough. I watched all the photos on the walls. I saw what was once a happy couple. Childhood sweethearts, star crossed lovers. And now here they were with an extra room in the house with pink walls and stuff toys and a large canvas in the middle of the room.

It must have been a nursery. They must have been expecting a child at some point.

Some departures are like flesh torn off with wounds running deep. Too deep to ever heal and the stench of that wound filled this place. No one ever told me or needed to, but I could tell the baby was miscarried. And what held Mrs and Mr Baker would not survive it.

Every other morning I came here and let myself in through a mysteriously unlocked door apparently left open by Travis Baker so I would not interrupt what went on in the room beside the nursery every morning.

I would quietly watch Mr Baker sitting inside the nursery before the canvas. As if entranced by it. His eyes would refuse to waver or blink as something inside him blocked out the noises from the other room where his wife and her lover lay interwined and rapturous. I watched Mr Baker refuse to be rendered lifeless by life itself as he would sit by the canvas with a trembling feet, trembling not from the cold but from an attempt at focus. He would try to raise a pencil wrapped inside a toe sticking out of a hole in the sock. The hole was carelessly bitten off yet it served it’s purpose well, I was astounded at what lengths he must have gone to do that, all by himself because I had doubts if his wife even knew about it.

He’d raise the trembling feet onto that canvas and try to sketch. A curve, no..wait. Another. Uneven set of curves coming down on the paper near its edge. The curve slowly became a rough circle with oddly placed spikes. It was hard to tell what it was until I realized that he was trying to catch the sunlight from the window and trying to capture it in there.

In his eyes there was a sun glimmering as he drew it. In some different world, some different time, he did not detest it as it rose every day. A sun that had not gone out like a bulb in his world. A sun that still filled him with life and led him through war torn lands in search of what only he knew. Maybe a purpose, maybe an escape. It was, and is, and forever shall be, for him to know and for me to wonder.