Category: Short Stories
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Gospel
“The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.” – John Calvin I was sitting at this graffiti-coated table when a man approached […]
Nitin Lalit
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Jingle
Hey man, I took some pills yesterday, the wild, blue devil stuff Macy sells, and my creative juices started flowing. My mind buzzed with inspiration, and I wrote something after almost a year. So, I wrote this jingle, and since you’re in the advertising business, I wondered if you could pitch it to McDonald’s. It goes […]
Nitin Lalit
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Jazz
One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz. – Lou Reed “No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.” – Joan Aiken Sometimes I wonder if I live in an apartment or an oubliette. I mean, there’s a cushy couch, […]
Nitin Lalit
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Guilt
Under a caliginous sky, on a mostly uninhabited planet, they marked her before leading her to her cell in the intergalactic prison. She knew the mark signalled something antithetical to an auspicious future and so she’d had it sliced away, leaving a scar. Her cellmate said it was futile, but she didn’t listen. The next […]
Nitin Lalit
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Interview with a necromancer
Imagine a reality where cadavers and gargantuan ‘bone mansions’ replace the quotidian rhythms of life. An actuality where caliginous skies, chanting and madness are the only constants, where the dead come to life and spend their second lives in servitude to a dark lord, a diabolical necromancer. Now imagine this fiend having a change of […]
Nitin Lalit
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Sodom
I woke up that morning feeling sixty-five, and I needed a walk. I needed to breathe in the fresh air. Now, I lived on the outskirts of the city and there was a Jacaranda Park very close to my house. The violet-blue flowers dancing to the rhythm of the morning breeze invigorated me and filled […]
Nitin Lalit
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Kris Kringle
There was a time when I drifted through the night sky in my sleigh, jubilant and possessed with a need to give. The children went to sleep on Christmas Eve with a smile on their faces because they knew I delivered what I promised year after year. Love beckoned me, and I chased her as […]
Nitin Lalit
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The Construct
We created The Construct in the year 2240 A.D. We cannot describe what it is because no amount of explanation will suffice. Nobody can see it, hear it, feel it, or even prove it exists, but it’s there. It took us almost a century to complete our work. We used the aid of psychologists, mathematicians, […]
Nitin Lalit
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Humpty
Humpty sat in the refrigerator pondering and pondering, which is pretty much what eggs did. They were deep, existential thinkers, contemplating on good and evil, and the nature of man and man’s relationship to them. Humpty pondered on metaphysical things like the eternal yolk, the finitude of the shell and predestination. Why do some eggs […]
Nitin Lalit
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Closure
I met another version of him after three years: a different avatar. I wanted to meet him after reading one of his recently published poems. The tone of the piece showed a shift from his earlier work. His initial writing was effervescent, or like David’s psalms, began on a note of melancholia and then drifted […]
Nitin Lalit