Upoma Aziz

"You know," I said, opening my backpack. "Maybe I will work from here today, listen to your story and write something on it."

As a child, every afternoon my playdates and I would go up to the roof of the tallest building in the community and stare at the clouds and make up a new story each day.

Every time I look at you, I am reminded how moot a promise forever is.

“You know, he never really stopped loving you.”

The ruby red kite fluttered above head, contrasted against the aquamarine sky, and it all was picture perfect for a split second, so perfect that it was a spoiler to the fact that something horrible was about to follow, like it did almost always.

Ta was our neighbour, but by no means was she the ‘girl next door’. She had never showed up on our doorstep cradling an ice-cream box full of pakoras her mom made, perhaps in the very same box I had delivered to their home a week earlier.

Salima didn’t realise that she had fallen asleep.

Her hair was perfect. Like, so perfect that if she would have to sell it to buy him a present, she would have a lot more than just twenty

If inanimate objects had the power to think, act, or speak, this particular 5 dollar bill would probably be at it wits end, feeling extremely awkward and out of place in its incredible finish and straight posture, trapped among torn, dirty, foreign notes hurling obscenities at each other.

Hello, dear old friend. Even after so many years you never fail to marvel me through your surprising change of attire at the transition from day to night. We are no longer strangers, not after the countless sleepless nights we shared, though sometimes I cannot help wishing

I walk with my head hung low, my eyes fixated on the gravelly sidewalk, and though I don’t look, I can feel their gazes sting on my

My dear Nightingale, today I set you free. This phrase I had repeated incessantly in my head without being able to voice it, and now that I have completed the feat, I regret my decision of not letting it out earlier.

It was no longer crisp and glossy, nor was it pressed to absolute perfection. Its charcoal grey had washed away into a dull, tired version of itself, much like its owner.

Perhaps it was forever scrunched into a few moments, or a few moments stretched to infinity; which one was true I didn't know, neither did it matter, all that mattered was now, or at least what seemed like the present – the vast endlessness laid out in front of me.

My eyes fly open, and I bolt up, my heart still racing. It takes me more than a moment to realise that it had been just a dream. Just. A. Dream.

In the mirror blotched from years of use and obscured under the layer formed from accumulated smoke and dust, Asiah glanced at her own reflection; blurred, and beaten down.

“You won't believe what happened today. I deem myself a deeply uninteresting person with an almost uniform detachment from the mystic and mundane events occurring periodically around me, so when my mother tried to

Kabir was halfway across his second cup of tea when a sudden noise made him knock the cup across the table, and some of though tea cascaded straight into his lap as well.

“I'm sorry, Ma'am, but we're closing now.” I look up to see Timothy, a student on scholarship who worked part time in this cafe, standing a few feet away from my table, with his hands folded politely behind him.

Even the slightest of sounds can seem piercing, when amidst crystalline silence. And right now, the noise of my own breathing sounds like a storm brewing to me. I try to breathe a bit more quietly, but there is little I can do to wane my thumping heart, which feels and appears to be a ceaseless machine.