Hierarchy Of Nonsense

June Pal wears black and smells of bitter almonds on the day she is to Erase a man’s memory for the first time. She tiptoes across the grassy, green fields on the slow, sunny afternoon, careful not to let the pollen cling to the ends of her oversized black jeans. Her posture is slightly skewed to the right, almost drooping, under the weight of a heavy rucksack that has only a sloppy sandwich and an unnecessarily large tablet. Her fingers are intertwined, fidgeting with rings

PART 1: SUNSETS The orange hue of the setting Sun cascaded through the slits of thin, wispy clouds and drooped onto the verdant hills behind them, glimmering on the red-clad, rusty bridge. June sees the woman first in this Memory. Her hair was a series of gold deadlocks tied neatly into a bun, poised like a ball of yarn on top of her head, with two free strands gently swaying down her face. Her hands covered her wide smile; the blue on her nails complemented the green in h

It was a moonless night, which was suitable for the purposes of Carrot Vines. Not that Vines was up to some kind of mischief. In fact, Vines was the sort of un-mischievous, uneventful man who tended to perish first in stories dealing with natural disasters. If the novel were to deal with avalanches on snow mountains, Vines would be the character sipping on a hot cup of cocoa, busy correcting alphabetical mistakes on a vague receipt, because it would be too much trouble to ru

It had started small and simple – just a couple of knocks, as soft as the whistle of sand seeping down an hourglass. It had started small – in the beginning, Edgar ignored the knocks, blaming it on air creaking in from a shallow crack in the attic. And simple – but the knock got louder and louder until entire oceans were crashing against the shore around him, scratching his frail skin, pounding his withering consciousness. It had started small and simple – yet here was poor E

After I have killed myself, I would like to be cremated and then have my ashes flushed down the toilet. It is a long story, and it began around fourteen billion years ago when the Universe decided to go pop in the aptly named Big Bang. For a long time after that, the Universe remained dark, and if I had my way, I would have made sure that it stayed dark. Unfortunately, the Universe slammed into puberty at the age of a hundred million years and began spurting out stars. Eventu

“Chai ya paani?” the clerk asked me, drumming his scrawny fingers along the rough, unpolished edges of the metal table separating us. He ran his right hand along the faded red stripes of his shirt and slowly slipped them inside to rub his chest voraciously. His other hand, meanwhile, amused itself by rummaging through the teeth he flashed at me in his broadened grin. Seeing the quizzical look drawn over my face, he quickly repeated himself. “Tea or water?” he asked. “Coffee