The Hazy Road

The rubble has cleared. The dying have died away. The ghosts have been set free. Free to look at these atrocities, and want to die again. What has the world come to. A young man cannot be injected with painkillers, because there is no clean skin left after the chemical burns to inject it into. An old woman weeps without a voice, for it has died in its swan song during her daughter's last moments. A panting son runs some more, in hope of finding his lost brother, in hope of finding a touch of familiarity in an alien expanse. Hope arrives in a red and white box screaming sirens of aid.  Stethoscopes, kits, medical equipment out. The healing begins. The young first. Then the women. Then the old. In order of survival rate and value of life. And in all of this, one simple question rises up like the smoke many fear: what of the children? What of them indeed. They scream louder. They perish faster. "Forget you ever had them." th...

The cleansing. That is what they called it. The British. Americans were quick to copy their forefathers. And so it spread to the United States of America. Publishers were hanged. Authors died of poverty. Editors became paper recycling entrepreneurs. Journalists were persecuted. America was great again. You see. There was once a great war. A war of intellect. Historians and linguists fought. Politicians promptly joined in. Lawyers wept. Common citizens began to blame the government. The syllabi of high school graduates in English was too heavy and complicated for an average mind. An intelligent man naturally came up with the idea to simplify the English language. His quest led him to a reasonable conclusion: it was time to kill the Comma. The Common Comma complicates. It redefines. It reiterates. Prepositions would no longer begin sentences. People would no longer forget the comma before a quote. The end of a quote would be the actual end of it. MBA graduates would pride upon...

It was a manufacturing defect. In the quest of our own design, we had uncovered what we called "evolution". The survival of the fittest. The strongest, and the fastest, both perished. But the fittest, the cunning, the ruthless, armed with the knowledge that the world was theirs to manipulate, had found their way. And that's how we came to be. A journey of death. Over thousands of years. Over billions of deaths. With rules to kill betrayers among ourselves. Entire kingdoms meant to serve a few, and control the many. Rich cultures to bind us to our associations, to attach meaning to our existence. To justify each breath. We ruled our universes. But was that all there was for us? ___ Clearly, humans were superior, but more so in their ignorance. For they missed what was always glaring right at them. The script. Imagine a world where you have the freedom to do everything. That would be too chaotic. So you evolve rules to avoid destroying yourse...

In words I found love. I would play with them, arrange them one next to the other, scribbling them off whenever they did not obey me and convey the meaning I wanted, decorating the i's and the y's with beautiful loops and curves, and smiling with pride once I wrote a beautiful writing. I would throw them around in obscure corners of paper- newspaper advertisements, useless posters, math sums- and my computer. I would be ruthless enough to forget them when I got frustrated about where to put them in my writing, and then, like a reluctant child, come back looking for the same beautiful phrases which I once discarded as stupid. Stories did not come into my mind like a train of thoughts, waiting for me to board it and be carried and led into a new world. They came in my romances with words. I would stare at a word or a sentence for long and out of some unknown fear or perhaps change of mind, the words would convey a different meaning than what dictionaries describe. They ...

It was too much to begin with, and too much to carry on till the end. Words seemed to lose meaning. Emotions clogged his thoughts to the extent that they were not understandable enough to any person on Earth but him: he knew that in the broken English and his faint sense of grammar he had written what would send him to an unforgettable trip down memory lane, where he would wish to live for just an eternity longer, no less. He would want to get lost in those thoughts and forget his pain that was a result of nothing but mistakes. Mistakes which had suddenly found a place in her doubting mind and her heart that was losing trust: everything began to seem different so suddenly, and soon those doubt-inducing thoughts created devils that drove her good spirit into a place where his existence did not seem necessary … the barriers of mind had finally managed to deaden her heart: the heart that longed comfort once, but was now pretending not to need it anymore… For her the illusion lasted lon...