Sunday, April 26, 2009

eight 100 words.

this is an experiment that i embarked on a couple of days back. i'd caught up with a friend of mine who blogs, and came across a series of her posts, where she writes short stories in 100 words. (thanks, S!)

i found this idea supremely cool, and tried a twist on it myself. here are a set of eight short stories where i've tried to tell a tale in a hundred words and a single sentence each time. in most cases, i've tried to involve as much of the past, the present and the future as possible to give the story some semblance of totality. in some cases, its an instance from a life-time, in others, its a life-time in an instant. i've tried to leave a few loose ends here and there, but the endings are mostly final. i found this literally little literary experiment immensely enjoyable...trying to tell a lot by saying very little...

disclaimers:
1) there is no connection between the tales, no continuity, no common thread. no, nothing to the order either.
2) if you detect any cynicism, its all just me and just found its way into the story. wasnt put there to drag you down into the dumps.
3) the usual crap about all characters being fictitious, yada-yada...
4) i dont judge you. you dont judge me. thank you.

anyways...here it goes.

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In the darkest hour of the night, she suddenly sat up in bed and wondered when was the last time that she had snuggled closer to him in semi-somnolence and finding warmth and the comforting smell of him in the nook between his arm and his chest and faintly feeling the reassuring beating of his heart against her face, she’d let herself throw an arm over his chest, a leg over his waist and curl up into a comfortable, smiling slumber that he said reminded him of a purring cat for the absolute bliss that it conveyed to an onlooker.

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He stared at the screen of his computer as it hung for the umpteenth time that day and cursed that day two years ago that he quit his job as an animal-trainer just because he thought he was making more friends in the animal kingdom than progress as a professional and traded in flexi-hours and a stress-free environment filled with furry, non-judgmental non-humans, in return for endless pots of bitter black coffee to keep him from dozing off in front of an excel-sheet that contained data that contained trends that contained the rent and the next installment on the car.

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If he had never loved, he would have never learnt that he could cry so much to see someone walk out of his life just because the time was wrong and so things between them would never be right, someone who was already inside his walls by the time he remembered that he had forgotten to build them and therefore someone who had seen him as he truly was under the tough exterior, in all his needy, naked vulnerability and still someone who had never seen him cry for he’d found the meaning of true happiness with and within her.

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As she watched the sun setting on the lonely beach and the evening of her long-lonesome life, she wondered what it was that she would regret most on the day of her very last sunset, the fact that she let her son walk into a disaster of a marriage without a word of advice because she felt that she shouldn’t interfere with an adult who was capable of reasoning for himself, or the fact that she walked out on her parents because she felt they weren’t treating her like an adult when they advised her against marrying her son’s father.

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The two of them gazed at each other from bus-stops on opposite sides of the road, two strangers in a strange land, each wondering if the other knew how incredibly lonely they felt when they returned home night after night to their reheated, ready-to-eat dinner eaten in solitude and to their empty beds, dreaming restless dreams of finding that someone, only to be shaken out of their reverie by the honking of their buses which they boarded to let life take them away from each other in opposite directions, remaining strangers but sharing a memory of what might have been.

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She racked her brains with increasing frustration as to why the middle-aged man in the train was smiling sweetly but stupidly at her with his hands folded neatly over the neatly-folded newspaper on his lap when she’d asked him whether Bandra was the next stop four times in row to no response whatsoever from him, and was actually considering calling him rude and asking him whether he’d never seen a woman in his life before to have taken leave of his senses as he seemed capable of nothing else but that stuck smile, when she suddenly realized he was stone-deaf.

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The young boy cycling home, lost in contemplation of how his parents would react to his joyous declaration of finally having triumphed over his academic arch-enemy after two disgraceful years of having finished a close second to her, and the young woman driving home, lost in contemplation of how she would finally quiet her parents’ misgivings with the plum modeling contract she had just landed which was vindication for her two struggling years in this cruel city where no one gave without taking much more, took the same corner at the same time, their lives respectively stopping and changing forever.

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In the middle of the battle-zone, crouched behind the still-warm, burnt-out shell of a car, the shell-shocked major from the Gorkha Regiment gently lay down his automatic rifle, out of ammo and surrounded by spent shells and the still or groaning bodies of his dead and wounded comrades, and wondered if his only daughter would realize her dream of becoming a veterinarian and whether she would marry a fine, responsible young man, as he slid his khukri out of its sheath and steeled himself for the forty-meter dash to the enemy’s machine-gun nest and the posthumously awarded Param Vir Chakra.

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that's all, folks!