Metempsychosis (a short story)

Metempsychosis (a short story)

Posted by A Great Liar

(Metempsychosis (Definition) : the passing of the soul at death into another body either human or animal)

I hear them through the looking glass, watch them flock around. I know them well enough; they never like to be alone. Peering. Eyes like legion smiling down at you, their innocence can drive you mad.

I stand up and walk about the room, shaking my head, hear things moving within. Things that don’t look too good, don’t sound neither. They croak and squeal their way around. Bolted eyes grilled on restless heads, arched figures with talons shifting gears on the narrow strip of the concrete ledge. Like empty shells carved to look like monsters.

It’s the chorus. It’s the singing at the window. There is a language in it for you to understand; put the voices together, many chords once played in unison start to make sense. It jangles my nerves, bouts of electricity piercing through my veins. Like a pendulum against my head, making it hard for me to stay still. There is another life pushing me beyond the edge of sanity, that indiscernible line. To pulsate like a ticking bomb.

Do they know what they are doing to me?

It didn’t matter. 

Unbearable. Dreadfully unbearable are the things they speak to me. I find myself a corner in the room, down onto my heels, holding my head against the temples, fingers probing nervously the throbbing hidden nerves. Trying to keep the head together, calming it down. It protests too much these days.

Announcement

Announcement

Posted by A Great Liar

A short story of mine, titled PERDITION, is recently accepted and published at MUDJOB, a blog space by Michael D. Brown, renowned short fiction writer of the modern day.

http://www.mudjob.blogspot.com/2012/08/javed-baloch-leviathan.html

Looking forward to your feedback,

Thank You

The Boy Who Knew Death

The Boy Who Knew Death

Posted by A Great Liar

As the sun rose each morning, so did the lonely old man with it; a sad limping figure strolling across the front lawn with a cigar tucked in his mouth, lighting fresh candles here and there, perhaps on an imagined grave of some loved one long lost to the infirmity of time and age.

A young boy living across the street, with an unusual pastime for a rather simple minded 12 years old, watched the old man out at the porch each morning, raving and talking to himself or the ghosts surrounding him, with his eyes staring wide and in excitement against the narrow scope of a binocular.

At times, he saw the old man going down in a fit of wild cough, settling against the neatly layered grass and spiting what looked like blood from the distance. The boy would be disappointed each time it happened, since it almost invariably spelled an end to his little morning show.

But it was never the cough or the sight of blood that bothered the little boy, the idea that the old man might die one of these days; because in his heart of hearts the boy also had a secret about him, a secret he had sworn to protect till the end of time.

___________________________

And then one fine day, when the old man began to cough incessantly, fell down, and remained unmoved for minutes on end, the young boy threw the binoculars down, got hold of one of the little Stickman Sam dolls stolen from his younger brother and ran for the house across the street; knowing that time was the enemy to all the magic in this world.

Because our little boy knew how to cheat death, though the only thing bothering him was that he just hasn’t quite perfected the art yet.

Once there, he leaned down and was relieved to find the old man with his eyes wide open, echoing loud irregular breaths.

There is still time. The boy realized; his young heart now a lucent dream in the wake of this newly found hope.

And with his eyes closed a little too tight, the little boy pressed the Stickman Sam against the failing heart of a dying old man and made a wish.

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Every Writer’s Room

Every Writer’s Room

Posted by A Great Liar

1

Under the pretext of writing, every writer worth his salt has come to know himself through the greater pain that drove him, the ever blind literary godhead oblivious of the pain of the underdog at its disposal, all the while knowing little of it as the hammer does of the nail.

Zoom in to read if you may, and you would know that every writer but strives to write his own epitaph, the glorious finale that will outlive the skin and bones, because who knows it better than a writer that how much has been forgotten in the name of remembrance.

Memory that finds itself on the paper, however inaccurate, is infinitely superior to a truth unknown, an over settlement of grievances between a sterile truth and the blind propensity that drives to bleed on the sheet of paper.

All writers want a thousand pages that will tear this planet in half, more halves the merrier.

2 

Under the guise of writing, there is a cold calculating act of telling people who they really are, to make them choke on their convictions, dissolve the molecules fretting about in their brains.

Most writers think better in the sunniest hours of their every day life, because that’s when the show is on at its incredulous best. Every man caught on the mystery camera, a victim of his surrounding, wary dissatisfied soul in civility and in rage against the reason of his age.

Reflections against the window view of every writer’s room and nothing more, with every man on the street being a well known superstition in abundance, offering a higher form of poetry, more in motion than in verse.

Requiem for the Vertical Man

Requiem for the Vertical Man

Posted by A Great Liar

To be dead is to escape accountability; no more squinting into fold-out maps to make a living, in apprehension and fear, for the errors and failings don't cling to you the way they did back home.

Good old days with life giving orders to the unshaped and the un-orderly, creating constellation within and around its many followers, with the entire mechanism of the host geared to accommodate the travelers adrift across continents and languages, floaters wrapped in the dull overbearing gaze of a sound thought.

A case of freedom boiling down to a pattern, a level and a norm; when to reach out to the man next to you, the buddy floater, was to violate the rules of the constellation within and without; and would he ever get to hear you, and in which language?

That is the mathematics of individuality wearing itself out, burning down to sheer multiplication of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades; each withholding a broader freedom within a nutshell.

Take a picture along now if you will; bring it down with you if it serves anything at all. Make it vertical, clad in fabrics making waves, now mere ripples silhouetted in memory.

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