By Shriraj More Pune, June 2025 — Early Morning Vedika heard the rain before she saw it. A shy, uncertain sound at first—like fingertips tapping lightly against a glass jar. It came from behind the neem tree that shadowed her…
By: Seyyed Mohammad Javad Mousavi It was a night like any other. The wealthy, with full stomachs and full pockets, slept the sleep of kings, while the office workers, with their meager wages—half-satisfied, half-starved—had somehow drifted off to sleep anyway….
By: Cithara Patra Lia winced at the tiny drop of blood bubbling at the tip of her finger. In her other hand, she glared down at the needle. She was never this bad at sewing, but losing her thimble and…
By: Khoi Pham I didn’t know exactly how The Shrink started, but people had been talking about it for a while. I didn’t really care, until it reached me. I noticed the first symptoms while getting ready for work. When…
By: Bruce Levine She walked blindly into the room as if she’d been there before, but she knew that she hadn’t. And yet there was a faint memory of an aroma that seemed to hover somewhere in the atmosphere and…
By C. A. Broadribb Given the times, you slip a blue cloth mask on over your nose and mouth before venturing out of the front door. Then you notice how bright and sunny it is and pop back inside to…
By Parthosarothy Mukherji The Bare Bottoms Club The idea came to him quite unexpectedly while writing his doctoral thesis on the ubiquity of the derriere in language, literature, street talk, slang, euphemism—the whole argot with all its varieties of usage,…
By: Kenneth M. Kapp It should have been no surprise with all the hype about how much better things were in the United States, never mind all the illegal immigrants working poorly paying shit jobs under horrible conditions, for other…
By Nick Patrick Hickman It’s Isaac who walks the three blocks to the grocery to buy the hamburger meat. This whole plan is his idea, anyway. Except when it comes time, it’s Harrison who will hold the meat. The bait….
By: Parthosarothy K Mukherji The Springbok was the national mascot of his native land, but his identity was always more tied to the eponymous musk deer—a species as alien to South Africa as was the country in which he would…