literary-fiction

You__l likely always have some reason or other to hang onto that girl. You just want her cause she was married to your son, and I understand that, he was a friend to me like a brother, near the only family I ever knew, and I miss him almost as much as you. But I need me a woman.

Here's to the future, he said and lifted the glass to his mouth. There was a lump of regret stuck in his throat as he spoke the words, but he washed it down with the whiskey.

As I grow ever closer to the end of my time, I look back at this life and tell you that the only thing I would wish to give up is the regret I've carried in my heart for all these years. At long last I have come to realize the things I once counted as regrets were indeed blessings that I was too blind to see.

Tastes change, Cherie. I find the older I get the more I like to be reminded of my youth.

He searched his mind for something more to say, something to take away her pain, but he could find nothing. There were no words to ease such a pain. He knew because the ache in his heart was as great as hers.

Holding the bread to her chest, she made her way home, thinking of those dreamy winter afternoons, when the light looked as it did now, the crystalline blue of the sky slipping into a faded purple, as faint as a bruise.

Over the years Breece had lectured that truth was liquid. That it evaporated in the heat of passion, froze in the cold of fear, and bent itself around virginous, unpurposeful fibs. It could churn and pull you under, drown you in itself, or let you ride upon it like a surf. But truth was always relfective. It showed blackheads and blemishes, fat rolls and sags, scabs and scars. Truth was fearful, angry and dangerous, and that was why so many people did their utmost to avoid it.

Mom rubbed the back of my neck and we kept walking, away from the kids and the colors and the high-pitched, happy voices. Seeing them made me feel like I was a million miles from anything good. I just got really lonely. I'm not sure why. All those kids smiling and laughing and my mom so fucking clueless and me feeling kinda shitty and high at the same time. All of a sudden, I couldn't figure out what the point was. I couldn't remember what mattered.

Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.We could breathe and talk to one another.We rowed past schools of fish and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.___ules Finn

Elsa's mother no longer spoke to her of men and love, but of duty and fate and accepting one__ burden. As far as Elsa could tell, if love really was the inherited female domain, then women were saddled with the biggest burden of all. It was pressing down upon them, the way the sea pressed down upon the creatures of the deep.

I wonder if every girl yearns for her father__ love,almost like waiting to catch the moon hiding in the trees__eautiful, yet so eternally elusive.-MUKTA

It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.

Sifting through scattered memories is like sifting through sand. Some remain, some simply slipaway_ TARA

It took me most of my childhood to realize that traditions have infinite power over us.-MUKTA

Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

_he__ assumed their relationship would go on forever. It was going on now, but in another way, like the rearrangement of the stars, which were all still in the sky, just burning in unexpected places.

Were the stars against him? A woman's fingers are quicker in the sky and shine more brightly.