Semi-fictional Shorts

HIS DARK GOBLIN

When he travelled back home, he was hoping to exorcise the dark goblin once and for all. Five years, the goblin had wrapped its gnarled fingers around his heart.

So he coughed up the black sludge from his lungs, leaving it to die in a corner of his room. He knew that by the time he came back, the sludge would have decayed, seeping into the air and the ground.

As he left, the black sludge crept along the floor with a sticky fluidity, and caressed his ankles. Fearful of sunlight and people, it never got past the front door.

He travelled home. For the first few hours, he genuinely believed that he was purged of the dark goblin.

On the second morning, he felt his heart seize. Numerous invisible hands pressed down on him.

Just like old times.

It made him feel like he was underwater. Daily living, field trips, and speaking with his family, became strange and alien affairs. His body was foreign even to himself.

He understood. The dark goblin had been in his body too long, it needed him as much as he depended on it. It had spread through every vein and artery of his body, right into the neurons of his brain, staining his visceral branches an inky black.

In his quiet moments, he came to accept the symbiosis.





HER CINEMATIC MIND

Her cinematic mind isn't working so well. With the dark cloud looming over her, the reels have stopped turning.

It disappoints her. She can't work like this. She can't put words to paper, when there are no moving images to melt into words. She watches moving images to get her mind-cinema working again, but nothing. The reels won't turn.

So sometimes when she's alone and she's sitting in the real world, in her mind she's sitting in a dark cinema, watching a blank screen, waiting for the show to begin.

With the dead screen on, she just feels alone. Her mind-cinema was her best companion.

Now she waits. She has to wait for another person to turn up. Another person who plays that kind of movies in his cinematic mind.

Then maybe, there would be someone beside her in the dark cinema.





HIS BODY

When they saw his body, their knee jerk reaction was to weep. Sick and dead, cancerous and grey, the body was a strange thing to behold.

How difficult for inorganic molecules to form an organic being, yet how easily organic things slip into an inorganic state!

After much thinking, her conclusion was that organic and inorganic was not that different after all. From that statement, she could easily reason out that everything else was not that different after all.

And so, all distinctions were artificial. All the living things around her were no different from the dead ones. After that, her life became one endless blue desert, seamlessly blending into the sky.

Things became much easier for her.