Nadia

by Alan Swyer

“When are we going to have lunch?” Nadia asks for the third time in the last ten minutes.

“We'll be leaving for dinner right away,” my father replies as he's done twice before, his patience clearly wearing thin.

We're seated in the living room of their apartment in Boynton Beach, Florida, a nicely decorated place that only mildly suggests that it's part of an assisted living facility.

“Why won't you let me have lunch?” Nadia pleads a moment later, her face showing signs of confusion rather than hunger.

I like Nadia.  Though technically my stepmother,  I've always preferred to think of her as my father's second wife, given that I was already married and had two kids at the time I was Best Man at their wedding.  But now I'm witnessing for the first time what my father never quite managed to explain during our cross-country calls.  The woman he's living with, with whom he has shared what have been- without a doubt- the happiest years of his life, is barely the same one he married.

Nadia's decline, I'll come to understand as I get more information, began with the death of her son, whose attempt to be three different people at once -- a biker, a hipster, and an attorney -- ended tragically, with a fatal overdose.  That was a shock from which Nadia never fully recovered, and it was followed by a bad fall, which further accelerated her departure from reality.

The result, I see all too clearly, is a situation with little chance of improving.  The good times together are now consigned to my father's past in the same way as the misery he endured with my mother.

During my childhood, my father and I were never close.  He worked ridiculous hours in an ongoing attempt to satisfy a woman for whom satisfaction was impossible, then distanced himself even further from family life because of migraines that disappeared only once he was widowed.  When prodded into some facsimile of what my mother called manliness due to what she constantly termed my “impossible behavior”, my father would occasionally threaten physical violence, which failed to induce fear or obedience, especially once I'd discovered boxing.  At that point, after daring him to try what he called “getting tough”, the threats changed from hollow to nonexistent.

Yet despite the distance and differences between us, what I've come to realize is that, in a curious way, I started follow his example early on.  Like him, I did everything imaginable to stay out of the house as much as possible, then I topped him by running away on more than one occasion.

When, at the age of seventeen, I departed for good, my parents, too, relocated.  That led to a joke they never appreciated:  that their only mistake was in letting me get my hands on the new address.  But their move only reinforced my feeling of having no place to call home, since I knew no one in the Jersey suburb to which they moved, other than my mother, father, sister, and dog.  And only with the dog did I get along.

Though I have little interest in aphorisms, there's one that does apply to my mother:  “People don't change, they become more so.”  Never easy, she became, as the years went on, even more demanding, more difficult, and more impossible.  Thanks to a mental ledger she cherished of slights both real and imagined, over time she distanced herself from scores of friends and family members, diminishing not just her world, but my father's as well.

Not surprisingly, our relations were marked by periods of estrangement, which grew longer once I, having moved 3,000 miles away, was busy with a wife and kids of my own.   Even our sporadic ceasefires were short-lived, thanks to my mother's barbed criticisms of what she called “California child-rearing”, plus her one-sided comparisons between what she called my “poorly raised sons” and my sister's “little angels”.

When I got word, after a particularly lengthy period of silence, that my mother, a lifelong smoker, was hospitalized due to respiratory problems, I tried my best to put the past behind.  She was in Intensive Care by the time I got to Florida, fragile and frail, sustained only barely by an array of tubes and other devices. 

Putting on a smile as best I could, I entered her room with a bouquet of flowers, told her I was pleased to see her, and announced that I would try to round up other family members who, like her, had migrated south.  But when I mentioned one particular cousin from her generation, my mother grimaced. 

“What's the matter with Sylvia?” I asked.

“Everything!  She's a monster!” my mother sneered with as much force as she could muster.

“She's always been a sweetheart,” I replied.

“Shut up!” my mother snarled, her countenance radiating a kind of venom I hadn't seen in ages.

I studied her angry face for a moment, then left the room without another word.

“Why are you leaving?” I heard my father ask when he stepped into the hallway while I was headed toward the elevator.

“Want the truth?”

“Okay.”

“Because I want to remember her in character,” I explained. 

My father took a moment to let my words sink in.  Then, to my eternal surprise, he nodded knowingly.

That, to my surprise, was the beginning of a new and infinitely better relationship between my father and me.  With my sister caught up in her own private melodrama of mourning and grief, alternating crying fits with expeditions for spa treatments and new handbags, it was on me alone that my father relied.  I was the one entrusted with the task of making arrangements at a mortuary.  Then, once he made the decision to have the burial in Florida instead of in the family plot in New York, it became my job to find a cemetery.

And it was to me that my father expressed his dismay once everything was over and done with, wondering why so many women - some who were known to him, others total strangers - showed up at the funeral, bringing containers with coffee cakes and danish, which they thrust into his hands, plus phone numbers, which they stuffed into his pockets.

“What do they see in me?” my father asked when we were alone that evening, munching with little zeal on turkey sandwiches with cole slaw and Russian dressing. 

“You're a great-looking guy,” I replied, willfully overstating the case.  “You're bright, good company -”

“That's not enough,” my father protested.

“Are you kidding me?”

“What's that mean?”

 “Dad, you're alive, you're male, and you've got a valid driver’s license.”

“So?”

“In the land of widows, you're king.”

My father pondered that thought momentarily, then surprised me with a chuckle.

My sister was aghast when, after a difficult few weeks of being alone, our father actually called a couple of the women who had given him numbers.  “What would Mom say?” she complained when she broke an extended silence between us.

“The way I see it, there are three choices.”

“Okay -”

“Worry about Mom -”

“Or?”

“Move to Florida to be with Dad.”

“Or?”

“Watch him die of loneliness.”

Once it became clear that Nadia had become first among the many, my sister went into overdrive.  From that point on, it was nonstop belittling, mocking, and knocking, all of which, to her chagrin, backfired.  Instead of heeding her negativity, my father did what he never dared do with my mother, turning a deaf ear to the badgering and bullying.  More than ever, he took to relying on me when he needed advice, or help, or simply someone with whom to do something new for him: shoot the breeze.

But that was when life was good, and Nadia was Nadia; when she and my father had a future that seemed, if not lengthy at their age, at least reasonably bright.  Now I'm in Florida, and their life together seems hopelessly grim as we're led to a table in the dining room at their complex.

Immediately my father tries to take control of a world that, for him, is otherwise falling apart.  “Every night there are three specials,” he takes pleasure in informing me, “a meat, a chicken, and a fish.”

Grabbing the sheet of paper listing those choices, he peers at it for a moment, then looks up with a quizzical look on his face.  “What's Rigatoni Bolognese?” he asks, struggling with the pronunciation.

“Tube pasta with a meat sauce.”

“Couldn't be.”

“Whatever you say.”

An awkward silence falls over us until my father flags a busboy.

“What's Rigatoni Bolognese?” my father asks, pointing at the words on the sheet.

“No se, senor.”

“Could it be meat?”

“Quizas,” answers the busboy with a shrug.

“What's that mean?” my father asks me, never having picked up the slightest bit of Spanish.

“Maybe.”

“See that, Mr. Know-it-all!” he exclaims triumphantly.  “A meat, a chicken, and a fish.”

Aware that my father desperately needs any victory he can possibly get, I take a deep breath, then feel eternal gratitude when Nadia bails me out by changing the subject.

“Am I ever going to get lunch?” she asks plaintively.

That night, as I lie in bed trying to sleep more than a few minutes at a time, I can't stop my mind from racing with the strangest combination of thoughts, memories, notions, and fears.  For no reason that makes any sense to me, I find myself first remembering, then pondering, the fact that my father has always refused Novocain at the dentist's, no matter how serious or painful his condition.  And I think back on how peaceful our apartment would seem when I was young on those mornings when my mother was ill or visiting relatives, which meant that it was my father who made breakfast. 

I go on to recall how shattered I was the day I finally gave up playing the piano, due to my mother's insistence that I only practice immediately after school, which meant no sports or fun with other kids, and that I only play her kind of music, not mine.

Those memories lead to recollections of lying in bed with a radio tucked under the covers, escaping from the world of my parents into one peopled with the likes of Big Joe Turner, Big Maybelle, Dinah Washington, and Little Willie John.

Tossing and turning in a futile attempt to quiet my mind and get some rest, I finally give up in frustration, then wonder why it is the world knows so little about people like Slim Harpo and James Carr, and why it cares even less. 

Then I ponder why it was that my father was so incapable of standing up to my mother. And how in the world he'll manage to survive if Nadia's deterioration continues.

Still finding few answers, I start imagining what the world will be like by the time my kids are grown.  And what kind of place, within that world, they'll make for themselves…  And whether they'll be happy, and have satisfying lives, and perhaps even kids of their own.

By that point it's 3 A.M., and I'm drenched in sweat.  Almost in a frenzy, my mind drifts into a vision that's haunted me forever - one in which I'm old, lonely, unwanted, and unloved, with everything I've accomplishment, and all sense of personal history, completely obliterated. 

And I can't wait for the night to end.

With family waiting for my return to California, and work calls mounting, I'm back on a plane a day later, feeling that I should make more - and more frequent - trips to see my father, rather than simply doing so when I have business in Miami.

What I don't know then is that a next trip will never come - at least not while father's still alive.  Instead of being left alone with a fading and failing wife, my father will keel over suddenly several days later while peering at the sheet of paper listing the evening's choices of a meat, a chicken, and a fish.  Instead of declining slowly, he'll be the victim of a fatal heart attack that spares him the indignity and suffering of even a short hospital stay.

The funeral will be short, sparsely attended, and completely misunderstood by Nadia, who will repeatedly call his name, wondering when she will finally get lunch.

Then I will again leave Florida, thinking about things my father and I said to each other over the years -- and more poignantly, the volumes that went unsaid that went unsaid.

  

Alan Swyer is an award-winning filmmaker whose recent documentaries have dealt with Eastern spirituality in the Western world, the criminal justice system, diabetes, and boxing. Though American, he also writes regularly for a British music magazine called "Blues & Rhythm." His fiction has appeared in Ireland, England, and in several American publications.

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We Can't Be Friends

We can’t be friends. We’ve been spoken for by the Universe, a power so knowing, so undeniable - it is beyond our combined scope. We can spend days by the ocean, skipping stones and flicking cigarettes but we know separation like we know regret; how inevitable it is, how looming it is.

The wind blows, a wave crashes and I turn to you, your body rich in color, irises the shade of emeralds, hair in a messy ponytail; a vibe so unfamiliar. I remember when I couldn’t look away.

“What do you think happens when we die?”

Sunlight hits your lens yet I can still see myself in the reflection, an orange tinge of a human being.

“Poof,” you say. “Nothing. You live and you die.” Your delicate fingers dance in the wind, hands intertwined above your head.

But that’s not true. You don’t believe that. We used to ditch parties and go to rooftops and stare at stars and point at the ones we’d like to come back as. I don’t faze you, you’ve grown too accustomed to these type of questions and musings.

“I feel sorry for you if you really think that,” I say and lay out, let the Sun scorch my skin, the beach towel the only thing between my bare back and specks of sand.

“Were you planning on doing something? You should do it soon.”

~

If I left it to you to explain, our story has no magic. It’s a moment. We met in a library, you needed a pencil, whatever. But when you hear me talk about the moment our eyes aligned, I can sense your awe, your sight following the words into the air, wishing you could gather this language and store it into a cauldron or a vase, decorate it with flowers, show it to your children. This fool fell for me one day. And he fell for me hard. Look how much he cared about me. Look at all the nice things he said about me.

“Our love is a facade,” you told me in privacy, two years later, cigarette in hand, eyes distant, cold, not there.

“A facade?”

“It’s not real. Nothing is real. We’re not here to do this, to live like this.”

“I love you.”

“How can you be so sure? What gives you the right to say something like that?”

“Just sit, let’s talk, can we talk?”

“I have to go.”

~

Why does the Woman cry? Why does the Man shout? If you leave, I’ll fall apart. I’ll disintegrate into the Earth, a lost memory, a facade of a human being, irrevocably ruined.

“I can’t do it anymore, I can’t take this shit.”

Your silhouette in the sun astonishes me. Its slender form, the way it moves, so smooth, so temporary. You know the type, the type of tears that sting to wipe away, to burn to release. If you leave, I’ll smoke a million cigarettes, drown in alcohol, call my mother, stare at space. We can’t be friends because we listened to Empathy together too many times in my backseat, in your bed, in my bed, in this lifetime. “I love you in a place where there’s no space or time.”

Sitting down next to me, your long fingers sifting through the sand, lighting a joint, I don’t think I could ever love again.

“This isn’t working. You’ve got to let me go, you’ve got to let me live.”

I could never be a surgeon. My hand trembles at your diction alone, my heart spirals into delusion. If you leave, I’ll go for a drive with the windows down, let the wind hit me. You always told me to remain unassuming, uncertain of the future. It’s a dice roll, a flip of a coin. It’s torturous. There's no year... just seasons.

"You need to love yourself first.”

I always knew it, I always knew love shouldn’t end in exhaustion, in repetition. If you leave, I won’t leave the house, tormented by what-ifs, goodbyes and no mores.

“If I leave, will you be okay?”

You don’t wait for an answer. You stand, your shadow towering over me, joint dangling from your fingertips and keep walking, seemingly into the Sun as it sets, a lone figure, a soul departed, a love unrequited. We can’t be friends because our love manifests itself into a ghost, a hazy dream, an illusion. As I go my way, the assumed truth slowly dawns on me: however long the heart beats, it has beaten both for and by you.

Mustafa Abubaker is a 21 year old writer and student of Pakistani descent in Atlanta, Georgia. A self-proclaimed music-addict, he wrote this story inspired by a Dream Koala song of the same name. 

He says, "This story is for me. I want to look back at it years from now and feel something."

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Anguished Culpability

What if you could step into the shoes of one of your most beloved icons at one of those crucial moments in their lives that end up defining them forever? Adam Ashraf braves these murky waters, venturing into the mind of the eternally fascinating Truman Capote on the eve of one such moment... 

My publisher just hand-delivered a copy of my new novel that will hit the racks next week- In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Me – cold-blooded killer. Merely looking at the instrument I used for the murder – the murder of a man far better than I – makes me nauseous. I can’t bring myself to touch it, much less read it. I steal a look at the back cover and read, “On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.”

Truman Capote. My name always comes with a little bio. In early days, I was called “Local Reporter”. Later, it was “Freelance Writer for The New Yorker”. “Best-selling Author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s” followed. Today, I get a new sobriquet. It is the most significant of them all.

I wrote a book that was of a new genre; a new style of writing. It is bound to become a classic and is probably going to be compared to the work of Hemingway. I am probably going to be put in the league of Dickens, Twain and Fitzgerald. I’m not just about to become the Manhattan literary toast of the sixties, I am about to become an icon. As the dreariest of thoughts pops into my head, I pour myself a glass of champagne and toast, “To the man who betrayed his friend!”

“Was it all worth it?” I wonder. In forty years, what will the world remember? The man who betrayed his friend or the man who wrote the best non-fiction novel of his generation? Am I going to be compared to Hitler or Lincoln? After draining my glass down in a single gulp, attempting to vanquish the guilt that refuses to let me go, I pour another drink. “To the man who will inspire writers in generations to come”, I say as I wait for my emotions to numb.
(continued below)

Guilt Of Ignorance: Icon by Michaela Rinaldi

“Of course it was worth it!” the rational side of me attempts to calm it down- the guilt.

“They were murderers, Truman.” I remember, my best friend, Nelle Harper Lee’s words from right after the execution. They are words that never fail to calm me down. “They were murderers, Truman”, I repeat to myself. Those words are my calming lullaby. They soothe me and shelter me from my own self-contempt. They help me sleep at night. I slump into slumber praying that they will sink in once and for all even though I know they never will. They are laws. They are not the spirit of the laws. They are what bound the laws, but they had nothing to do with justice. They are not what bound me. I know better. Perry Smith was indeed a murderer, but he was no beast. Perry Smith was indeed a murderer, but he was no monster. Smith was my friend. If Smith was a monster, then who is not?! If Smith was a monster, then what am I?! And now he is gone. The pen is mightier than the sword. I would know - I used it to kill.

That champagne isn’t serving its purpose. I need something stronger. I gulp a gin martini and toast out-loud with the theatrical tendencies I shall forever be notorious for, “TO THE MAN WHO KILLED HIS FRIEND”. I scream hoping it will numb my senses because the alcohol is doing such a bad job.

My demons will haunt me for life. I know that. I know that my editor, Shawn, is a stranger to the truth. He will lie to save himself the guilt. “You didn’t kill them,” he would tell me with the most plastic of smiles on his face. “You simply did not help.” Nothing is further from the truth. The whole jury probably read In Cold Blood’s excerpts before the final verdict was made and the sentence was uttered. I practically tied the noose around Smith’s neck with my bare, filthy hands, to land myself a bestseller. No, no, no – I did it to make myself an icon. I need more gin. Straight, this time.

“To the biggest writer of the twentieth century! TO THE BIGGEST FRAUD OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY!” I toast in my sharp voice as I turn around flamboyantly.

What is happening to me? Why am I thinking like that? This is the book that millions around the world are waiting for! Millions around the world are chanting my name! I can’t pull the plug now. It’s too late. I’ll open a charity in Smith’s name. It’ll be redemption for his sins. “And yours too,” my demons remind me with a condescending look on their faces. I don’t know what they’re talking about – I haven’t done anything wrong. Everything will be okay. In one week, I’ll be the biggest household name in New York. I’ll be the biggest household name in America! I’ll attend all the fabulous galas and parties. Life will be good. It will be good. I’m sure it will be.

“It ought to be, right?” I mutter over another glass of gin.

-Adam Ashraf

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Devil's Breath: Curse in Disguise

I recently went through something that got me thinking about power and how having it bestowed on us may influence our actions. Upon research, I found the ultimate power tool, Devil’s breath, a drug that rids the taker of free will, the real life equivalent of Harry Potter’s Imperius Curse. This short story explores how a person would react to owning this drug. P.S. Before you jump to the conclusion that the main character is the 'villain', stop and consider what would you have done had you been given the same opportunity. 

I stared at the package before me, unable to comprehend whether it was all a mere scam or if this was genuine. It seemed like something out of a Harry Potter book but if this really worked, which was a one-in-a-million possibility, I’d probably be able to become The President of the United States in a week or so. The limit was beyond the sky. I looked at the little vial again trying to find a loophole. The bottle was labeled ‘Devil’s Breath’ and instructions were written below.

“Use this powder on who you wish to subdue.

May be ingested or smelled.

Compulsion powers in this bottle”

There was nothing to lose. Nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Suspicion captured me though. This wasn’t the sort of thing you’d find in your mail. Was it even legal? I picked my bag up and headed off to Starbucks. Seeing the seemingly infinite queue got me thinking about Devil’s Breath so I opened the vial put out a little powder on my palm and headed off to the cashier directly. I blew it at her. For the first second or so, she had that look of confusion and irritation on her face that basically said, “What the fuck?” To my utter surprise, it disappeared though and was suddenly replaced by a look of blankness. Total blankness;

“Grande Amaretto non-fat Cappuccino, please”, I said the please as a plea, a plea that this would work rather than backfire the way everything did these days.

"Yes, ma'am", she mumbled as if in a daze, and shouted the order back to the barista. A look of bewilderment must have flashed across my face, but I was in a daze, I thought it impossible, yet I had seen the proof with my own eyes. "Will that be all ma'am?" "Yes, yes," I said quietly and shuffled to get my drink, ignoring the indignant shouts from the people behind me. She handed me the Starbucks and I reached work in Fifth Avenue, about ten minutes later.

My boss was frowning, whining and bitching as always. A crazy thought came to mind. Could I try it on her? I was nearly risking getting fired here. I took the vial out, put a pinch of Devil's breath in her Starbucks. I slowly picked up on the blank look reaching her face so I told her to shut up. Typing letters and picking up laundry wasn’t what I signed up for when I got into public relations. A crazy thought came to my mind but I suppressed it thinking that would just be too immoral. I saw a couple of coworkers in a heated argument over god knowsF what, I reached into my bag to take out a pinch of that magic powder, thinking whether it was worth it to make them shut up. I withdrew my hand and carried on, leaving them to settle their petty disputes, knowing that now, I'm far above them

My boyfriend came to pick me up during my lunch hour, about four hours later. During lunch we discussed what we were going to be doing on the weekend for our anniversary. I wanted to just recreate our first date by going for dinner and a movie. He wanted to go to a new club opening. I knew that was probably the most immoral of them all but I used a little powder on him too. He left a bit later convinced that dinner and a movie was the coolest way we could spend the night.

Back at work, Samantha, my boss, gave me a lecture about how lunch hour made her lose a call with an important client. She told me that I was never going to be good enough and that I represented what was wrong in the industry. My frustration with the thick idiot reached its boiling point so I decided that I’ll set the crazy thought from the morning into motion. I left her mid-lecture and walked straight to Smith, the company’s CEO, and compelled him into firing Samantha and hiring me in her place. He did immediately.

As I left the building and went down to hail a cab, a stranger stopped me. As a New Yorker, I knew that I shouldn’t have stopped but he said, “How’s Devil’s Breath treating you, Taylor?” I knew instantaneously that this was the man who gave it to me. How else would he know about it?

“It was you,” I muttered under my breath. “Precisely, Smart,” he said. “Congrats on your promotion; Senior publicist at twenty four, impressive.”

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, it’s amazing but why me?”

“Random selection, you could say. I’m a philosopher, forming theories on the human race. It was sort of a test.”

“How did I do?”, I asked in anticipation. “Dismal, Taylor, dismal”. I was about to protest when my phone buzzed. It was one of those annoying commercial texts. I looked back up but the man was nowhere.

What a day! Was it the best day of my life or the absolute worst? Could I have possibly sunk so low as to rid my efficient, maybe a little too tough boss of her job? Did those customers at Starbucks really have to wait for me as I got my cappuccino? What about Nate? Did he really have to miss that club opening he was craving for?

This day wasn’t a good one for me. It wasn’t filled with the challenges, exhaustions and adventures that usually made up my day, ones that, to the contrary of societal perception, were the ones that made us happy and set our fate into being what it is. More importantly, I wasn’t happy about my promotion… Sure, I was leaving my shared Brooklyn apartment to a lavish one in Greenwich Village and I was going to be able to buy more designer clothes but the feeling of self-fulfillment, that I made someone out of myself wasn’t there, what was the point? I haven’t grown and thrived and rose up the challenges that I faced to get here. I was a guinea pig, the failed product of a madman’s experiment with a drug that was bound to turn the world into a madhouse.

I called Nate, my boyfriend and told him I want to go to that new club opening instead, inboxed Smith telling him that Samantha should stay in the job and smashed the vial into a million pieces on Fifth Avenue then spilled water on the powder and glass that surrounded me on the ground. This was one invention that shouldn’t see the light of day.

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Lobster Man

In a land where pink trees nudge higher at a bright yellow sky everyday, it's only natural to assume that a lobster man lived there. He had to lobster feed, bright red hard skin and a clamp, his left hand though was completely normal. The man's growing rage was all thrown behind a pair of fierce purple eyes, so his rude heresies never gave away his psychotic personality, nor did his fearsome looks.

The man went to the local pool with no apparent purpose, too friendly, however, to be told off. This kept going for a year or two, until one particularly hellish day; he barged in carrying a large laser gun along with an army of 12 thousand spotted African elephants – all imported from Nepal. Nobody thought much of it, since this ghastly sight was far from odd, in fact it was more like a monthly festival, though meat balls are more commonly used than laser guns. The deformed fellow, however, did not seem to be in a festive mood, quite the opposite in fact, he intended on boiling all the people in the pool to avenge all the lobsters being cruelly boiled alive in gourmet restaurants everywhere. He succeeded.

Except when he shot his laser gun in the air, it hit the city's central water pipe thus flooding its electric station and causing fire to surround it from all sides, blocking any emergency vehicles that attempted to get through. With the intense heatwave, no water for sanitation and no electricity, diseases break out causing parasites to eat away people’s brains. Meanwhile, the fire keeps spreading furiously; burning down entire cities and basically turning the world into a giant inferno. This naturally produces enormous amounts of carbon monoxide and dioxide causing the depletion of the ozone layer and leaving the Earth prone to all the harmful cosmic rays. Combined with the heat from the fires and its emissions, the very fabric of time and space is torn so all the dead people from the past start flooding the Earth and complaining about how much better their generation was than this one.

The whirl pool of hate and resentment grows to an extent which causes the Earth to turn to a giant baked potato then explode! The people naturally, keep suffocating in space since there is no oxygen, but they can’t die – They keep reviving because of the space-time tear. People end up floating through space flickering between life and death, miserable for all eternity.

-Raya Masoud
Awesome aspiring scientist and more importantly, lazy and crazy

Source: Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, USA

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Just Another Day at School

Dumb people walking in slow motion surround me, they remind me of stranded sheep. I throw away the dirty cloth I used to clean the dried blood off my custom-made baseball bat that had nearly 127 one-inch nails attached to it…pure beauty. It did take a while to do that though; I should probably use Dettol next time. I lift the loose-hanging bandanna around my neck to cover my nose, eyes and chin, then I tighten it firmly.

The electric guitar intro starts; I lunge through the Brain-Dead crowd and start bashing heads with this beautiful instrument of mine, perfectly timing it with the beat of the drums. I keep swinging and bludgeoning, pouring all my imprisoned, suppressed rage on them. I enjoyed every moment of it, the music is so loud! The drums are smashing hard; the electric guitar is playing so fast, it's insane! Pure madness!

I'm hitting so savagely now, as if I'm possessed by Satan himself. I start laughing uncontrollably, quickly getting hysterical, until I'm interrupted by the abrupt pause in the music and then a calm, tranquil song plays; I stand confused for a fraction of a second, before I'm snapped back to reality in my normal school uniform sitting peacefully on a bench alone, with my headphones on, while the students go to and fro in all directions just before they leave school. The song is still playing. I look down at the source of music in my hand, which is my phone, and read the name on the screen…"Mum".

"Yeah, Mum?" I answer.

"I'm not going to pick you up after school today, take a cab and come home, okay?"

"Sure, see ya", and I hang up the phone, to find the same dirty cloth I used to clean my bat in the other hand; I sigh and think to myself, "I seriously need to see a doctor.", then I throw the cloth away and blend into the crowd, resisting the slight urge to smash the face of a student with a forceful punch, until I make it out of the school of the school gates and find my way home.

"Upon writing this small story, I've reflected upon my dark, dreadful days in my old school. Back then I had a very chaotic, rash mentality; since it has been a very morose period of my life. I've always had violent thoughts, and had almost no friends preferring solitude. I've always looked at things from one perspective; making me miss out on a lot of things…

But, after revolting on my previous lifestyle, I've thought about temporarily resurrecting it, and try to write about how I've really been like back then. I guess that's what I got…"
- Nader Mohamed Ghoneim

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Goodbye

The Goodbye Girl by Olga Noes

They looked at each other with a sad face. They were overwhelmed with a mixture of emotions, a little happiness with a partial sadness, an excitement with nervousness. It was time to say good bye to the person she had respected all her life. He was the one who had supported her at all times, held her hand and guided her towards the path of light. And today, she had to leave this very person.

She was filled with guilt for leaving at a time when he needed her support the most. She touched his face, feeling his soft wrinkled cheeks wet with tears.

“I’ll miss you a lot, baba,” she whispered as a flashback of the entire life she had spent with her father unfolded before her eyes. Ever since she was born, her father had been her only companion at home. He would cook meals for her, take her to school, helped with her homework and not to mention, supported her financially. She was his little princess and he had always been ready to do anything for her if only it put a smile on her face.

But today was her wedding day. The day when she would become her husband’s responsibility and will leave behind the most precious person in her life. All his life he took care of her and now when he needed to be taken care of, she had to leave him and that too for his own happiness. His dream of getting his daughter married had finally come true.

The fiesty celebrations were coming to an end. The guests were about to leave. With tearful eyes and a blurry vision she could see girls wearing their abayas and old women wrapping themselves up in their huge chaadars to cover before leaving the wedding hall.

All close relatives had gathered around waiting to be hugged by the bride. But she was not ready to let go of her father. She felt a warm hand over her shoulders and knew at once who it was.

The warm hand had always been her support after her father. Today it was the day to hold it forever. With tearful eyes, she looked at him through her shoulders and heard,

“It’s time to leave,” her husband said calmly. While still holding her father’s hand, she hugged her relatives and then, finally, let go. Her husband placed his hands around her waist and walked her towards their 'chariot'. The car was decorated with hundreds of roses but right now nothing was going to cheer her up.

Before getting in she turned to cast one last glance at her old and weak father and then finally shoved herself in with a heavy heart. The only thing to do now was make a silent prayer.

“Oh Allah, I trust you to take care of my baba when I won’t be there with him anymore,” the car engine roared and a new journey begun.

-Aisha Idris

A nomad exploring her talents. Discover more of her works at www.aishaaboo.wordpress.com

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