I watch as the crinkled, bright orange edge of a Reese’s candy bar slowly makes its mechanic descent before getting caught on one of the spiraled spokes on the way down. It hangs from D1, taunting me. I bang a fist against the glass of the vending machine, but the candy bar just swings lazily, happily. A child on a makeshift tree swing. Dammit. I give one final kick before turning away, sipping acerbic, cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
I have been here before. Not on this floor exactly, although the steely gray tiling and the white, cinder block walls accented with a single stripe of inexplicable pink along the molding is replicated throughout the entire hospital. My dad got me Junior Mints the first time I was here, Mike and Ike’s the second.…
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The house was a plain yellow rectangular structure with an awning above the front door and a long porch in the back, white window trim, gray shingles on the roof. I was relieved when I saw it. My mother had predicted doom and gloom when I told her I was moving in with Roy, not to his condo in town, but to his childhood home upstate. She had conjured pictures of trailer parks and double-wides. My mother has a very dim view of the standard of living in rural areas. She’s a die-in-the-wool New Yorker and anything lower than four stories is a hovel. I told her she worried needlessly. Nothing would change much for me, just the location. I write for an online publication and with a decent connection I can work anywhere.…
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“Is it really possible to stay awake for four days?” said Jaya. “Will we even enjoy it?”
Four days. That’s all we had. Two of which we’d spend in the train, coming and going. I decided: we mustn’t miss one minute. We emptied coffee sachets down our throats, giggling at the sari-swaddled middle-aged woman frowning at us across the aisle. We climbed up to our top berths. The bhang we drank discreetly, from a flask: mixed with rose-scented lassi to cloak the smell. Jaya was nervous: with edible marijuana, dosage is tricky, and she’d had panic attacks. I did her dosing for her. Studying for exam after exam, in noisy hostels in Allahabad, in summer’s endless heat, I’d perfected bhang dosing. Coffee and bhang: that’s all you need to stay awake and happy. …
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The body appeared on the fourth of October. I remember, because Lucia had suddenly decided to break up with me the night before, but also refused to leave our apartment, and didn’t want, in her words, to “force you to leave, either.” So, we were stuck in a cat and mouse game of who could tolerate sleeping in the same bed longer, until one of us discovered the humility to find a new place to live. It was a big apartment with wood floors and exposed brick, and all for pretty cheap, too. I wasn’t going to give in.
Everything about the place was great, spare the apartment building next to us. We could easily look into the apartment parallel to ours—and hence, they could look into ours.…
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“And what’s so wrong with my taste?” Sophie had asked him once, her skirt tight around her thighs when she crouched down to poke at the logs in the fire. He had smiled, a wide line that hinted at the white teeth between his pale lips, and shook his head.
“Nothing, I suppose…if it’s all you know. It’s a little dark, maybe.” It was a sly taunt, unsubtle but companionable in the dark warmth of the room.
“I don’t need to be taught anything, you know.” She could remember saying to him, more than once. Then and at least a few other times, when he had said he would introduce her to some new books or music or food or opinion. “I’m whole and capable on my own, without your meddling.”…
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Time means something different to me now. It used to symbolize hope, an opportunity to try something new and perhaps, waiting for something joyous to begin. But now, it’s just a burden, a reminder that everything under the hands of time and everything within it must die. But waiting to die; that’s something else entirely. The flowers on the kitchen table are wilting now. Their red petals are drooping towards the ground as if they too are crying, only to lap up their tears in the vase in which they dwell. I haven’t paid too much attention to the flowers before now, but here we are, and here I am, having my evening tea, only to be staring at something I never thought of as living.…
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I am like water. I reflect things as they truly are.
It’s more a state of being than a mantra—something I picked up while meditating, ever since that day some twenty-odd years ago. I’m supposed to close my eyes and measure my breaths. On the inhale, I become the essence of still water, a flat and glossy pane of glass. A pond in the heart of a lush forest, striking enough to captivate a man until he returns to the soil as a flower. I hold my breath there, freezing the landscape in stillness and solitude. Then, the exhale, revealing the truth behind false colors and illusions.
Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Become the lens through which to see this world.
Opening my eyes strings my gut with unease.…
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