Liberate me: A 100 Word Story

The train has stopped and I mingle with the crowd coursing out, journeying up to the street where all go their own way. I am on the look out for a library.

I sing:

“Wandering here in the wild
shadowed by the bright day
I look here, there, I’m a child,
liberate me from this dark play”

There is no one I encounter on my path; the sunlight pierces my eyes and I am going blind. The knowledge of truth is out of my reach.

And this is when I touch upon the undeniable sprout of insanity growing in me.

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Written in consideration of Friday Fictioneers’ Weekly Prompt.

Image copyright: Randy Mazie

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Awakened: A Very Short Story

To bury my hands in loose soil, so to conceal them and embrace estrangement, was a choice. It is always a choice, only brought about by a fate that leaves you skeptical about the spirit of human.

I have a furtive understanding with those in my surroundings, which was not there earlier. And now when I meet them, they know that unlike them, I have many worlds colliding with each other. And sometimes I am in their realm and at other times, I am hollow when I am somewhere lost in the worlds of my own making.

I visit them quite often now, if not in my physical self but then, as a reminiscence, clinging to a wall as they sit and talk, unaware that the sun faces another eclipse.

“He is a Ravana with the ten heads,” they articulate. I cackle, my 320 teeth glinting in moonlight.

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Linked up with VisDare 65. It has been a while since I last participated in a VisDare prompt and it is good to derive inspiration from this amazing photograph.

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I think I heard them talking along these lines…

This is one of the two… “J______t”

“My eyes are screened. I had three. I have them still but I can not see. I changed a lot from the colour of sun bathing grass to that of wet sand… and all that I wish now is to see”

“I think you can make up for it by revelling in the benefits of each of your organs.”

“Do you talk about my coarse hair over hard epidermis, those wretched fronds, or my grease; well you sure don’t talk about my milk. Do you? They are not for me. All I have for me are the eyes that I wish I could open and go fish.”

“Ah! You rhyme so that I feel it in my seeds.”

“And do they stick within your fruit and reach those humans when bulbs of your yellow flesh, they do pick?”

“Yes. But they know how to get rid of it.”

“My green, prickly love; how I envy thee and your clinging to the life source, the life-tree. Your heart beats with the earth. I am forlorn having fallen off, sitting atop the sand. I have forgotten the story of my birth.”

“And how I despise the way they stab me and when they wash away my sticky love. I am the pieces in the curry while you form the base of it.”

“How does it matter? We become the food that they eat and into their stomachs we go, giving to the world our last bow.”

“I am rather glad that we are picked off. Wouldn’t it be befouling that despite of our benefits for them, we remain ignored? I say I love those vegetarians.”

“You do. So I do. I feel their arrival. May be they will first remove my blindfold and let my pearl white entrails gaze at the sky so I could cry.”

“And there you go. I shall wait. My turn would come when my entrails would kiss their hands. Goodbye friend.”

~

The spot of the sand where the one who wanted to see rested was left with a hollow, a single long brown dried hair bequeathed by him to the past he left for, for the present, was left in the wake.

“Kalpataru…” A song lasted forever in the wind.

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For Oloriel’s Tale Weaver’s Prompt at MindLoveMisery’s Menagerie. Can you guess the names of the “two people” in conversation here? I have already provided the photo of one.

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Open: A Short Story

“I am never going to be someone I am not. I don’t mind being open but I am more of a genteel person by nature,” I say mumbling.

He doesn’t reply. He has directed his entire focus towards the steering wheel, as if trying to solve the riddle that I am, in the slight hand movements he make, while coursing through this coarse traffic. I, on the other hand, have my eyes set on his lips, awaiting them to open and grant me some wisdom.

They do open but just for him to release the breath he has been holding. I am eager. He doesn’t oblige.

As my end stop does come, I slowly open the door and look at him one last time. His eyes are now determined to see through the dashboard to the mysteries of what this machine is made of.

I ponder at the colours of the car in the moon shine as he backs and takes my last view away from me.

“It was not worth talking to him.” The words reach me before the source. She comes and sits atop my shoulder, as she always does. “You can open your heart to me.” She gives me a choice. It is enticing but I would better not. And she knows that. Vanishing in smoke, she leaves me alone.

I have nowhere to go. I settle down on the rotten grass, acting as a cushion for me, from the cold gravel below. I kiss my hands, rubbing the heat of my breaths, soothing them this warm night when I am cold.

No one comes. No one ever comes on this path. And the driver would not return now. I have no strength to pick up on those tiny lights within my heart for him to feed on. But she would return. “I should give up to her. Why wait any longer?”

But she is not going to arrive just like that. I wait. She never comes. I freeze in the boiling sun the next day and the day after next, I am blown away. I have opened up my molecules and now, they return back to where they came from. I am no longer one, as I never was. I am bound. I am open.

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Gathering: A Short Story

They gather out of nowhere, like a crowd that drifts towards where blood gets spilled. And the blood is spilled this day, right outside where I fell down, while playing with the neighbourhood guys. I cried many tears and made a puddle out of them on my palms.

I was rushed to the doctor. I do not remember much but for the agony, when he sprayed some liquid which coagulated my blood there and then, which still is circumventing through my mind. I have been acting like a lame person ever since returning back home.

And now they have gathered. I have loved them since as long as I can remember. Mum tells me that it had rained the morning I was born and my first cry was accompanied by the ringing of the temple bells and the morning hymns of the gurudwara, symphonising with the drip-drop of water pearls. So, it may very well be so that we are connected in some way.

“It is going to rain,” my sister says what everyone already knows. She rushes off to the terrace to gather the clothes, hanging to get dried in the sun, but the fate has it that it must rain today.

I cripple along her up the stairs and reach in time to have the first drops to fall down on my cheeks and stream down my throat to the chest. I feel light.

She gets angry and asks me to go back down but I am not the one to listen. I am here to pick at them and gather what I can, hiding them in every possible crevice of my body. I do not joke and thus, my intent is true.

She has gathered the clothes. They are now flung on her left arm and she hands over her right for me to take so that we can go back down. But I rather hold onto the door and crouch because I do not want to be taken away. I want to see my destiny in the few drops that have painted the dust riddled bricks below me. My blood had made stains just like that.

And then, the thunder crackles and the lightning zooms piercing the sky apart and showering blessed pearls. She exclaims in horror and takes me by force and yet, my arms try to reach out to them as she makes me walk down with her.

Stepping down the stairs, I lose my view of them at their gathering. I want to join them. My vision, thus screened, and I am thrust to darkness.

Now, I rise, feeling the trace of those drops on my cheeks that stream along, down my throat to my chest. I feel light.

I clutch at them dotted on my skin where the matchsticks have branded them. Feeling my ribs, I fall down on the bed, zooming through the many gatherings of visions or dreams. It doesn’t matter what they are because they are tangible to me.

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A 500 word story for Oloriel’s Tale Weaver’s Prompt. It is a blend of reality and fiction… what is what… I don’t know and I won’t tell.

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