New York City wears an extraordinary scent tonight—a peculiar medley of smoke, sweat, and sickeningly sweet alcohol. The air is lit by a crescent moon and flashing neon billboards—it’s damp with expectation, with aspiration; and with the threat of imminent rain. But the blue-black sky isn’t clouded—it shows promise still for a brilliant, sanguine concrete dawn.
The streets of New York City are a nightclub tonight, a nightclub kept alive by sirens and screeching breaks, honking and music from Times Square. No one’s asleep tonight—young men and women salsa down the sidewalks and spill onto the roads in front of police officers and street vendors, into the alleyways and out of the underground subway staircases. Their excited, anxious, slightly slurred voices whisper and squeal, they scream and chortle—there are so many voices that comprehensible language is inaudible. These million tones, emotions, energies—they dovetail into a harmonious cacophony.
That singular orchestra—it drowns away the music from my battered guitar. I watch my own fingers snap mechanically at the fraying strings, but I have to crane my neck and tilt my head towards the body of the instrument in order to hear the melody. Suddenly, my cheek is exposed to a sliver of white hot pain—flinching backwards into the wall behind me, I rub the tender flesh and discover in my closed fingers a broken segment of my guitar’s E string. With a long, deep breath, I lift the threadbare strap over my shoulder and place the shapely thing back into its empty guitar case.
Overtop the tall, dull, dusty read buildings, I can see it—the tip of the tall metal pole and that illuminated, spike-studded ball it carries—it shimmers like a thousand diamonds in a the light of a sunrise. I press my back against the building wall behind me and watch it flash its iridescent colors. I may be one of few, but I’m not the only one alone tonight.
Pressed between the five-foot interstice that separates two equally mundane concrete buildings, I brush the dust off of my face, off of my exposed arms and feet. Its ten days into winter, but the air is still only crisp with mild cold—it barely bites my skin. Without taking my eyes off the sky, I begin to brush away the crinkles in my dress. Over the din of the surroundings, I can almost hear the white taffeta rustle as I smooth my hand over the fitted, beaded bodice, as I shake out the pleats that run from my hips to my ankles. I raise my hand to my hair—the tiara still clings to my frazzled curls, but the flowery gauze attached to it this morning has been lost to the teaming streets.
The tip of the ball flashes its rainbow. My throat constricts. All at once, my face is warmed by a stream of silent tears.
Grudgingly, I lower my dampened gaze several feet, till it falls upon a window two stories from the ground. It glows orange from the light within, muffled by the blinds that shield the apartment from the public eye. Suddenly, the blinds are lifted, and a shaft of light escapes from the window and lands in a rectangular box around me.
Green eyes and sharp nose, he wears a crumpled tuxedo and a hollow countenance. He struggles with the window pane for a moment, and then slides it open. My breathing quickens, I open my mouth, but I’m incapable of making a sound. Shakily, he raises a cigarette to his lips, and then a lighter—and then his eyes squeeze shut, his body grows stiff and tense, and he thrusts away both cigarette and lighter with an aggressive fervor. They land with a soft clamor on the filthy pavement opposite to me. His eyes fall. In a moment, they connect with mine.
First, his face contorts—his eyebrows furrow and he squints his eyes, his lips part and his head tilts, ever so slightly. And then his jaw falls open—he presses his hands against the windowpane and for a moment, for a moment I catch the right corner of his mouth slide upwards, I catch a glimpse of straight white. And then it’s too much—I roll out of the beam and back into the shadows, crashing into my guitar case. For a moment he stands alone in the frame of the lighted window. And then he’s gone.
Slowly, I lift myself back up, swallowing large gulps of the dank, near-midnight air until my breathing loses its sharp edge and scrambling speed, until I can no longer feel my pulse jump from my heart to my throat in a portion of a second. Crawling back into the shaft light, I tilt my head back up to the sky—only to watch the glistening orb disappear behind the silhouette of the apartment building in front of me. The countdown has begun.
20, 19, 18… I hear, chanted in unison, boisterously, poignantly, from Times Square.
“Anna!”
I jump to my feet. My heel catches the hem of my dress and rips off a swatch of fabric as the adrenaline returning to my veins instantaneously—I turn my head towards the call. It’s him, carrying a hopeful yet melancholy expression, a bottle, and two glasses. I stiffen as he ambles towards me.
16, 15, 14…
“You don’t have to start out this New Year alone, too.” Cautiously, he comes close enough for me to see the moisture that coats his olive colored eyes. “I can’t let you.” He uncorks the bottle with his teeth and fills each crystal glass with an amber liquid. Placing the bottle on the ground, he takes my hand and unfurls my fist, wrapping my fingers around one of the glasses.
11, 10, 9…the chant crescendos into a deafening cheer as it breaks into the final ten seconds.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter, inaudibly at first, and then—“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”
7, 6, 5…
He shakes his head, bringing a slender finger in front of my lips. “Forget about it.”
4, 3, 2…
He raises his glass and presses it against mine. “Here’s to starting over,” he says.
And all at once, the city explodes with the potential, the possibility, the power of his toast.
Archive for the Category »Short Stories «
“Vande Mataram!”
Throughout the swarming buzz of sound, the patriotic cry is the only one which resounds clearly–it pierces the pounding of the rain and reverberates in the humid air, into the coat of wet grime which makes the streets slippery and brown.
“Vande Mataram!” They wail, they scream, they hold each other and post the tricolored flags on their doorsteps, on their rooftops, on their cars, on their shirts and hats. They don orange saris and pray in gratitude for their freedom. They pour into the streets they were not allowed access to–they sing in loud, clear voices. Victory, at last.
For a moment, rolling thunder masks the anthems of their tribulation and freedom. The sky suddenly convulses and procures a corrugated sliver of blinding light, rendering the firmament a ghastly shade of white and green. It casts an eerie glimmer upon an empty alley, flashing to reveal a petite silhouette.
Torn paper, broken bottles, rotten carcasses of once-cooked chicken, and wet excrement litter the narrow alleyway–the catcher of all trash haphazardly thrown out of the apartment windows, leaking out of torn, unattended garbage bags. Beneath the thunder and the overwhelming enthusiasm from the streets, the quick, sharp pitter-patter of rodent feet is barely audible as they scamper beneath the litter, causing the pieces of scrap metal to clink together.
Beneath even the noise of the rats, a highly trained ear would be able to make out an incongruous sound–the rapid intake and release of shallow, halting, quick and unsteady breaths. The slim shoulders of the silhouette double over onto knelt, bent legs, which press against shattered glass and leak a thin stream of crimson. The shoulders heave, the demure figure shakes violently. Her slim arms tremble beneath the gossamer fabric of her white salwar kamiz, torn and wrinkled. She holds her quavering hands beneath her bent torso–one clutches her stomach, one presses against the torn fabric which was not enough to guard her inner thigh.
Caught against the handle of a garbage can adjacent to her, a soaking, mint colored scarf flaps helplessly against the wind and the rain.
All at once, the thunder ceases–the downpour halts, like the tap of a shower-head is slammed closed.
“Hindustan, Hindustan!” The cries from the streets persist with an unparalleled fervor. “Vande Mataram!”
Slowly, her battered silhouette straightens. Lifting one vertebrae at a time, she rolls into a seated position, her thick black eyebrows furrowed, her delicate hooked nose crinkled as she presses her closed fists into the ground and stretches out her legs. She winces as she places her bare foot flat upon the filthy ground, as it crunches into labyrinth of feces and sharp debris. Her brown eyes glinting with bitter fury and pain, she snatches the drenched scarf from where it is snagged onto the garbage can. With deliberation, she wraps it’s tattered folds around her head, the tip of her long black braid peeking through the end of it.
Finally, she manages to rise to her feet. She tips her head towards the sky, her face reflecting the obscure medley of the colors it emanates. Her lips part–they move as she whispers silently. Her chant grows louder and louder as she places one foot ahead of the other–walking hesitantly down the alleyway, into the teeming streets.
“Allahu Akbar,” she repeats, with greater and greater resolve, “God is great, God is great.”
Her homeland had deserted her, it had reached into her mind and stripped the flag which rested there of orange. Ruefully, she made her way to the crowd. But hers is not triumph–her battle is upstream.
“Allahu Akbar,” she chants, and quietly she declares, “Long live Pakistan.”
I’ve found it. After a full three hours of digging and searching in the same one foot vicinity, the sun is slowly beginning to sink down behind the rolling hills that make up the horizon. It doesn’t look like much—a weather-beaten plastic zip-lock bag so encrusted with dirt and caked with mud that its contents are masked completely. After wiping my own dry, cracked and filthy hands carelessly on the black skirt which I had stood in, sobbing silently, at this morning’s funeral, I picked the bag up gingerly, ignoring the shower of soil and little black beetles it deposited as I lifted it out of its shallow grave and placed it on my lap. Its contents made jingling and clinking noises—with shaky, dirt-encrusted fingernails I pinched it together and snapped it open.
I’ve got to hide these, Jake had said with a conniving smirk, holding the bulging zip-lock bag in one hand, and a little garden shovel in the other, I’ve got to put them somewhere safe, where they won’t find them and try and take em from me! He handed me the shovel and took my small, dimpled hand in his, dragging me down the grassy hills and past the pasture where our two twin mares grazed lazily. They came into my room just last night, he had said with frightful passion, his eyes glinting with a touch of anger, they came into my room and searched my drawers and my closet, and almost found my collection! He held the bag up in front of my face and shook them till he could hear the jingling, the clinking, and smiled with satisfaction. But they’ll never find my little stones all the way out here.
I had smiled eagerly at the adventure, warmed at the pressure his hand lent to mine, and followed him into the valley where the grass came up to our thighs and quivering rabbits darted between our legs and made narrow paths for us to follow. I didn’t have much of an understanding as to who they were, or what they could possibly want with the prized collection he had clasped tightly in his closed fist, but I was young then—I didn’t have much of an understanding for anything. more…
The brilliant golden sun rises in the east and falls to the west, and the young street rat Raju wished he could follow its route from his makeshift shelter by the water of the Taj Mahal to the gold-paved roads of America. The west with its equalities and regulations–the west with its education and opportunities. He heard about the west from the American tourists, some white but mostly brown, who wore tantalizingly tiny outfits and spoke with the slightest air of arrogance. With his little sister in his hand he clanged together his bowl of money to collect spare change and disgusted glances–some pitiful, others mirthless. He heard about America from these people, who spoke with lavish praise about the marble monument and then related it to the skyscrapers and flashing lights of New York.
“We don’t have any sort of Taj Mahal,” they’d say with awe, and then their voices would revert back to pride, “But they don’t have New York city here, do they?”
Then they would drop a penny into my bowl and as they walked away I heard them, “We don’t have those creepy beggars either.”
And that’s somewhat exactly what Raju and his little sister had been for the past two years, ever since his mother passed away giving birth to a stillborn third on the corner of an abandoned alley, just two months after her husband’s illness brought him to the same fate. From morning to evening Raju and his sister collected pity-money, sometimes as much as ten rupees, and used it to buy themselves a few rice cakes or other light goods from the numerous street vendors.
But Raju’s sister had grown ill herself, no doubt due to the fumes and the trash and sleeping on the streets millions of people had walked on with filth clinging to their feet. She was only four years old, but her face carried the maturity of someone thrice her age, skeletal thin with huge brown eyes. She might have been a beautiful child, but the sickness pulled her face down even further and gave her a ghostly countenance. When once she had remained quiet, now she cried often. The sickness gave her hunger, and Raju couldn’t collect enough money to feed the both of them whenever they pleased. When once she had been no more than an extra hand to aid her brother to beg, as the tourists took pity on her starving child appearance, now she was more of a burden than a help.
It was getting to be too much for Raju. He pined for the west, he longed to go to America and learn how to read and become a lawyer or a banker or someone powerful. He wished he could be someone waited upon day and night. He saw the tourists at the Taj Mahal with cameras and expensive sneakers and he knew, somehow, that if only he could get to West, he could be like them too.
So, idealistically, he routinely saved one rupee each day in hopes that one day he would have enough for a plane ticket. But with his ailing sister, his savings were drawn into for food, a sweater for her cold limbs, and whatever inexpensive medicines he could get his hands on.
A burden, his sister had become. He hated to admit it, he prayed forgiveness every time the thought crossed his mind. But his sister prevented him from getting his ticket, his way out. A few times, he thought, that the struggle was not worth it.
Now he stood outside the slums where his sister now stayed with a band of beggar children managed by a few thugs. The five thousand rupees in his hand felt heavy, too heavy, and as he turned around slowly and walked away, he pondered the gravity of what he had done. An act of impulse and ignorance–he had no idea as to his next course of action. He had never thought this far ahead, never believed he would actually acquired the money. But now his hand felt empty without the small palm of his sister, and his heart sank. There was no way out. There was only a way to fall deeper into this abysmal rut of poverty and ingratitude.
I tell you it was a fine summer night, that night of the crescent moon in the sweet-smelling month of June. It was a fine summer night, with the moon gleaning as white as a bone, masterfully bent out of shape. I lust after the moon, how beautifully carved it is. How smoothly it wanes, as if the whittler carefully shaves the ivory bit by bit, from the center out. Makes me want to give it a try myself.
My knife is shaped like that beautiful crescent moon, I tell you its a rapier to be proud of. Sometimes I run my needful fingers along that ruthless blade, just to feel how smoothly it makes the cut, how deep. The pain is clarifying, the blood so enticing. I lust for it–the tangy crimson. How wonderfully scarlet it is, like rose hips crushed to paste. Its smell is sweeter than roses–it makes my heart beat. My blade smells of it. I love it.
Call me sinful, call me insane, call me sickening filth rival to the devil himself (though I myself have always pictured the devil to be a woman). It’s of no matter at all to me, I tell you I don’t give a damn. I don’t give a damn for anything but my blade, and how it helps me satisfy the lust which burns without fuel from within the depths of my bloodless heart. How its silver sharpness tickles soft, tender white skin, how it shaves the top of flesh and draws that tantalizing liquid of life. The cut always clean, always deep, smooth and satisfying. Ahhh how sweet the pain feels. Thinking about it fuels the lust–throws a finger to the blade–but alas, no more, no more.
I’m getting ahead of myself–I tell you it was a fine summer night that day when all of my desires were stuffed down my throat to choke me. Who would have known that such a fine night could mean so much damnation for me. That night I could feel every heartbeat, I could taste the beads of sweat my restless body drowned me with. It was no use trying to sit myself down and read a book or scrawl down a few thoughts to subdue the lust like I normally force myself to do. But that day, my blade was rattling in the pocket of my worn black habit, it was just as thirsty as I was. There was no controlling my urges today. It had been too long–it has been too long–so I got up from that god-damned chair of mine, put down that god-damn blunt pencil, grabbed my beloved knife and strolled out the door with conflagration in my chest.
Now there’s a little path behind my cottage not too far away from this here asylum, and it snakes covertly through quite a sinister forest in the night time. It’s a popular hiking trail around the summer time, but the people rarely stray away from their tents after dark. I can always find little bunnies or even a foal if I’m lucky–anything to pacify that eager curved rapier of mine. I told you it was a fine summer night, with just the slightest zephyr to waft the sweat of my anticipation, my desires. That night the crickets chirped to the slamming within my chest, as my eyes darted around to look for something delightfully soft and vulnerable.
Imagine my utmost delight when I found, huddled in a cold little ball in the undergrowth, a shivering and whimpering little creature! At a closer glimpse, it was a boy, not more than five years old, with frightened eyes and flesh so irresistibly smooth. When he heard me coming, he right about wet his pants!
“Mommy?” he asked, with a quaver in his high pitched voice. Hah! To think he thought I was his mother! It made me laugh maniacally, made my fist clench and re-clench upon the weathered grip of my blade. Never does anyone expect such violence from a young maiden like myself. Perhaps that’s why I remained undiscovered for quite some time. Until this day.
“I’m not your mother, you fool,” I laughed, and quickly I snatched the boy in my arms and stroked his soft, ample cheek. Hah–his wide eyes, his incredible fright–I tore off a clump of my thick, waste length chestnut mane and used it to tie the boy to a tree so he may be subdued.
“Mommy! Daddy!” the little boy screamed before I could fill his mouth shut with a pile of dried leaves and dirt. That wretched high pitched voice of his–it cut through the night as sharply as my blade would have cut through his delicate skin. Nonetheless, it was too tempting, it was too much to run away from for fear of being discovered. I had to act quickly–I withdrew my glimmering alter-ego from the depths of my habit, raised it to just above the flesh wrinkled by a face welled up with tears–went in for the incision–ALMOST, almost drew that beautiful life-blood–
“Not so quick missy!”
And my arm was held back, I was tackled to the ground. They took it away–my beloved rapier–my lovely crescent-shaped appendage–they ripped it from me. They threw me in this here cell and called me insane. Alas, but they don’t know the pain and the desire which consumes me. And so here I oxidise slowly, in this damned asylum, they pity me as a waste of a lady. But one day I will escape–I will retrieve my blade and run away from here! I’ll stand under the moon and pine for it, pine for flesh, lust for blood and ohhhh will I find a way to be satisfied. I tell you I will.
Saturday evening brought me to the beach, no matter the season, weather, tide, or wind speed. It was a routine Jacob and I had followed religiously, but now I sat on the coarse sand alone and watched the swollen red sun sink into the horizon. The sea frothed and crashed upon itself, and I remember watching Jacob crash and froth with it while he tested the oceanic might with his surf board.
Which is why when I told them that the ocean had swallowed him one evening in December, they shook their heads sadly and tried to console me without asking questions.
We came in the evening because that was when the sea was its wildest, when the moon peaked through the dusk and bullied its slave. Whoever was still there watched as Jacob battled the strong waves as the daylight faded—they knew him as the Night-Rider. I would laugh tentatively because Jacob used to joke that the waves weren’t the only things he rode at night. more…
