Skip to main content

Posts

Room number 713...

When she heard the sound of scrabbling under her bed she gaped in horror. The roof was no longer there and the sky was crammed with stars. The yellow lamplight had its neck twisted and the light was dimming, a dark hairy whisker of shadow creeping up to swallow everything. The sliver of light coming in through the parting curtain was the only thing remotely consolatory in the creepy hotel reminiscent of horror movies, old and new. The wooden cabinet shook and the drawers slid out, one after the other, like the many tongues of a hysterical creature of the nights. The clothes hanger slid to a side and revealed the crack in the wall beyond. She tried the light switch but obviously it was not working. The bedspread was damp from something that was not hers – an ache spread through her limbs, paralyzing her, bolting her spine to the cot. A whiff of chill air snaked through the open fisheye hooks of her blouse, circling her rigid frame, raising the hair on the back of her nec
Recent posts

Sexy Receptionist

Whenever someone asked him what he would do if it was his last night on the Earth he said he would sit and chew his tongue. Of course a reasonable answer would have been to either play loud music or make passionate love to a woman, but he somehow found it inconsistent with his own intellectual curiosities, to be trapped in something so real as drinking costly wine for example. He thought he would spend his time mulling. The prospect of last night affected him deeply. Unlike for many, it was not the night to fritter away. To know that tomorrow does not exist, to know that it was the last night did not rearrange priorities in his mind as it did to his friends and relatives. The apocalypse was announced and pretty soon the last night was upon the planet. He tried, as he imagined he would, to sit and mull, to do nothing more than introspect, to pursue a cosmic dimension of some sort. But he was not alone. There she was, the sexy receptionist he hired only last week. They had to

Ground control to Major Wolf…

Major wolf prodded his clawed grimy nail into the console and regally laid back on his plush leather lounge. He lifted himself a little for the leather made a chugging noise as he slid on it. The overhead panel made a noise that was akin to what you hear issuing from a tap (back on planet earth) before water makes its long journey through the pipes and burbles out in the vent. The hot-iron red of the panel glow bothered major so he held his hand up. But this was not going to work. So he reached for the console and pinched a knob clockwise. The red light dimmed and now the inside of his cockpit had the look of a womb so much so that major wolf went to sleep right away. A crackle woke him up. What was it? He looked about him. Major wolf was not the type you woke up in the middle of a dream. He noticed the green agleam on the speaker so he roused himself from the leather lounge and paddled in a daze toward the crackle and making a good fist, thumped on the instrument. The crac

Zombie bees, Shravani & grizzled old man

Shravani wiped her mouth and swabbed her blood-drib lips with the sleeve of her lemon-green blouse. Above her, a garish noon was swept aside by a rather fat cloud, silver-fringed and wan-brown. She leaned back on the heels of her shoes that were scuffed and unbuckled. She kicked the shoes clean and looked about her for a pair of better shoes. Among the tufts of green, she found a set of teeth, gluey and dripping blood. Following the rope of blood interspersed with pressed clumps of grass, her eyes wandered about and settled on what looked like a straw-stuffed scarecrow.  Her ears caught the sound of the roaring buzz of bees; she instantly dropped to her knees and now dragged herself to a shelter, by the mound of mud, prepared to dig into it with bare hands if that is what it took. The bees, like a swishing curtain came at her; now the sound fuller and final… She was seized. An arm, a fat grizzle-haired arm was clasped around her forearm. The bees made the tintinnabulating s

Vikram-Betal wives fight it over...

Spirits don’t cry! Why, my husband did. You don’t believe me, do you now? The truth remains that he did. And for the reasons best known to the world of spirits, we don’t share our secrets with the rest, you know, the living ones I mean. Lor, lor, lor… he cried with such a tenacious heart that his eyes sank deeper and deeper as he knuckled them like a schoolboy does when someone steals his hat or a peacock feather tucked in dog-eared class notebook or a pencil sharpener. He cried and cried. And he cried a little more. My heart melt away like wax under a candle’s flame that is caught in a fiery draught coming in through an open window at night. The fluttering orange and blue flames of his shame melt my waxen heart until it became matted, pale, amorphous, and loosely sputtered on the wooden plinth of my soul. We have been married for a very long time. We were married before we were cut loose form the captive overcoats of our human frames. It is generally agreed that the matrim

Page number 46

Anusha climbed the stone stairs to get to the assembly hall. Pacing diagonally through the great hall, she found a place by the corner beside the other women. She was suffering from a severe headache all night long; in the magical moments of the crack of dawn, she managed to get some sleep and was presently late to the daily summoning. The mustached officer in khaki trousers swiped his finger in air; Anusha rose up cursing and coughing. She reached his desk and folded her arms before her. The officer crossed his legs, unfolded a paper from his shirt pocket, ran his finger over it, and rolling his eyes to meet her, showed her the adjoining room. In the room, a lady in pin striped trousers was looking through the window that overlooked the railway track. Now a train scurried about from east to west. Stepping into the lady’s elongated shadow, Anusha waited. The lady had dyed her hair brown and wore a nice pony that rested on her nape ever so beautifully. She turned around to face Anush