‘It rained furiously that day, the monsoons raking across the land, an electric storm tearing up the sky, and Jenni was wearing a green men’s shirt and shorts, and the rain had soaked it onto her like one long changing and glistening fish-skin. The quad was empty of people, they […]
This was a moment before they flung the autumn leaves at me. Just before they walked us down the mountain from their secret place at the top of Bhatupura. Just a few minutes before they carved our names into the special rocks up there. Where they argued with us with […]
This is what she imagines it must be like to be held by another person: It must be like sleeping. But sleeping held up by someone else whose body becomes your bed, who becomes the tree that you fall into and the earth that holds you still. It must be […]
I reset my bones. Rearrange their order, chess pieces in a cruel game. Realign my jaws so that my smile breaks apart, cracks open my cheekbones like chicken bones on Sunday. A hideous grimace, transition takes hold. I readjust my spine, the vertebrae running another metal track. A grinding shift […]
We know what happens to abandoned places in the world. Grass pushes through the concrete, vines climb up the steel. Birds nest in buildings. People seeking quiet; the misfits, the rebels, the dregs and drudges find their way to these places and settle. They spray the walls with their hopes […]
This is what the shopkeeper asked me: I don’t mean to offend you but can I ask you something? I’ve worked here for a while and I’ve noticed something strange. Why do Muslim people buy so much pistachios?
Aisha, she of the pink cheeked, butter-eyed expression with two scarf tails closed around her face like ship sails. Aisha, of the oversized plastic chappals that are her ‘walking shoes’, up and down the mountain, through mud and sunshine. Aisha, who smiles cautiously through big glassy eyes, head bowed, middle […]
She fears it, The return of the moment, of stooping low,a dish in her handspouring out her heart red splattering in the silver her back turnedheaving in acorner and nothing is left
This is what she dreamt: She is riding across a sunset, skimming the surface like water. There are delicate sentences as fragile as the bones in her wrists slipping through the sky. They are swimming though the desert and all around them there are clear liquid words that they can […]
“I wonder what my generation will do with what we know of marriage. I think of a married person as a kind of specialist. It’s tempting to have faith in specialists – to assume that barbers know the essential properties of hair and have studied it so thoroughly they can […]
