The alarm buzzed. He wasn’t used to waking up this early. He was. He was still groggy. He had been having a nice sleep. He grabbed his phone, turned it off, still half asleep, and jumped out of the bed. If he hadn’t, he might have turned over and gone back to sleep. He shivered as he walked around the empty apartment for four. He was the only resident this month. He relieved himself, brushed his teeth, all the mundane things, wore the appropriate attire, grabbed the appropriate item, and walked out. The sky was dark. Soon, there would be the dawn light, but for now, nothing.

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He was clawing his eyes out. He tried to. It wouldn’t work. He was coming close. He could feel the warm blood on his forehead. Sticky. Making its way down his eyes. He opened them, let out a growl, then a frustrated scream. It was still the same. Something was wrong with him. Something was wrong with his eyes. He opened them again, nothing happened. One eye opened, the other shuttered open, and then closed. Maybe it was in his head. Maybe his eyes were fine. Insidious. A worm. Crawling, it’s end wriggling delight as it dig holes and tunnels in the furrows of his brain, permanently damaging it. Maybe that was it. He could see through one eye, the other was now closed.

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“Hey Siri,”

Hesitation. Longer than usual. He bit his lips. “Play Westside by Ekoh.” he smiled as it started. He shouldn’t have. But he was feeling the mood for some nostalgia. It had been a really long time since he had heard this song. And almost immediately, the feelings came rushing in. Later, he would reflect, they hadn’t been drowning. Maybe he was healing. Well, he was glad for that. The worst thing about a situation like that, and he’d known, she hadn’t, was when you call it off, you justify it to yourself and come to terms with it sooner. He had told her to. She had needed to make the decision. He wasn’t selfless. But when it came to those he loved, he would take bullets for them. And this situation had put a lot of bullets through his chest. Stifling. Suffocating.

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The laughter was loud. Obnoxious. Contagious. It spread across the neighborhood. It was early morning. People woke up. They woke up annoyed. But lying in bed, and listening to the laughter, they smiled. An elderly couple almost made their way to the house from whence it came, but thought better of it. It wasn’t that bad. Other neighborhoods had wide beaters, screams, and police alarms all the way into the wee hours of the night. They had someone laughing, this was the first time that he had this much. Let him laugh. He suffered from a mental disease. Other people and other neighborhoods had natural disasters. Somehow, they were free. They didn’t. The morning was breezy, the rays of the sun were lazy. The community was gated. The houses were large. The laughter came with a buzz and a cackle. A crackle. The sounds of the intercom. He had pressed it, and was laughing. Or it had turned on by sound. The latter was more likely. But he did suffer from some mental problems, they had found out. He had lived there for years. He had recently had an accident. His head had been injured. The nurse that had come over initially had told a nosy neighbor that an area of his brain had been damaged, and the news had spread like wildfire. It was a closely knit community. News travelled fast. And he had been a good kid, and still was. He offered to mow their lawns. He offered to sit their pets. He was a good kid. They were old. They had bought these exclusive houses with a lot of saved pensions. They were all old. Except for him. He was a good kid.

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The terror was profound. There was no time for her heart to even race. She was just in shock. He held a gun to her face. She had knocked on the door, expecting to see his smiling face like she did every morning. The tousled hair. The dimples. The lopsided smile. The eyes, smiling with benevolence and wisdom. The wrinkles all about his face. His hands, which she had always admired. So delicate, even in age. Decades of drawing. Of painting. Of writing. Of inspiring and changing lives through his chosen medium/media. He was soft spoken. Would always greet her with a smile that felt like it was reserved for her. Warm. Affectionate. Fatherly. Followed by asking about her. And not that fake kind either, the one that people do. No, not that. He would genuinely want to know l. And now, there was this. The gun was held squarely in her face. It was not shaking. She had held a gun once, it had been cold, impersonal, and heavy. His gun looked odd in his hands. This was not the weapon she expected to see there. A pen instead of a sword. A brush instead of a mace. Not this.

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I winced, a moan escaped me. It was cold. Icy. There was a huge block of ice in it. They had pushed my head in. I don’t know why. But they had. There were three of them. Big, animal, bulky, brutes. They had sneers on their faces. Their hands were in their pockets, and the hands were moving around a lot. It was the eyes though. It was the eyes that terrified me. Hungry. As if they wanted something from me. I was too young to know. But death is the great equalizer. Death shows you all because now you are eternal. The eyes terrified me.

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The sun was blasting its usual intense heat. The humidity was ever present. There was a slight wind, which was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because the people that were standing by the banks of the river felt cooled. A curse because there was no reason for them to leave. The river was not really a river. It was called The Canal. It ran through parts of the city. Once, it had run through the entire city. Then the city had expanded, and The Canal had not. It was dirty. It was opaque. The surface was opaque. It smelled, and standing outside, on the roads on either side, you could smell it and your nose would wrinkle in disgust. Yet it was an important part of the lives of so many people. The drug addicts would gather and smoke or consume their substances by its banks. On hot summer days like this one, hundreds of children would be splashing or swimming around on it. Their mothers, if they weren’t cleaning toilets in other people’s homes, would be sitting and gossiping by the banks. On days like this one.

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It was complicated. Let’s just start with that. Miscommunication. Misunderstanding. Blindness. All the trademarks of a classic movie fight.

So, it was complicated.

The rain was tremendous. Hailing down. I had clicked the wipers from their slow pace to medium to fast. The rain would not stop. Dredged from where, god knows what. That type of rain, and it’s rare, reminds me of that line from Pokémon sapphire. “It’s raining.” Those lines. “Yes, just like we envisioned.” “What do you mean? It’s raining far more than we thought?” A deluge brought about by a slumbering giant. Flooding the earth. Not bringing more sea. But destroying all of the land in its wake. The problem with this rain is that the effects can linger for a long time. Especially in this country. We still live in a city where the drainage is better. Maybe not by much. But I suppose better is an overstatement. It exists. Natural drainage. Not the drainage that wasn’t even an afterthought for the builders. It’s funny. You would expect a city that’s by the sea, a city that used to be the capital, that used to be the Dubai of the world’s airports before it was cool, you’d expect that city to have good infrastructure. But seventy years of looting the city, and you get what you get.

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Falling, dreaming

Talking in your sleep

I know you want

to cry all night

Falling. Arms flailing. He was falling on his back. The sky above him was looming every farther away. He knew he wanted to be there. He could smell the acrid fumes, and poisonous gases that would slowly kill him and revive him time after time, and then kill him so that the pain and torture would never end. The sky was painted a dark blue, clouds hanging low and ominous and fast rising. Or he was falling. He shuddered as a gust of wind blew around his body, a gust other than the shrieking wind that was racing him to the bottom. It felt hot and cold at the same time. A soothing blessing, and a burning curse. His heart raced, trying to break free of his chest. Trying to stay up. Maybe by pumping blood, it could fly to where he had fallen from. Fly to where he was falling away from.

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He looked at the other two. The atomist had his head in his hands. The authoress was still scribbling. He wondered how long they would be here. Was it not time to go yet? Was it not over? He knew it wasn’t. He shuddered. He knew a little more. There was something else. He hadn’t told the other two. He wondered how they would respond. But there was something else. And the secret was eating him up from inside. But he couldn’t let it affect him. Nothing affected them. They were The Three. Three was such a beautiful number. All good things came in threes. The land, the sky, the sea. The three dimensions, which they saw. And these three. Them. Us. They were the three. There were pieces on the board, pieces in the game. That were also paired in threes. And they were the best of them.

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His heart raced. Trepidation in his chest. He looked at his hands. They, at least, were still. He walked over to the blinds, and slowly pulled them down. His legs felt hot. His ears felt red. The room was musty. The carpet was shaggy beneath his bare feet. It was blue, his bed, now a cover on it, was red. The brown desk, standard sized, between the bed and the wall, was holding a collection of books that gave it character and texture. He grabbed the head of the bed. Steadying himself.

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He looked up at the sky, face parallel to the ground. Eyes blinding under the merciless glare of the summer sun. He took in a deep breath, and slowly let it out. He felt, could visualize the oxygen going through his nostrils to his lungs, cooling every pipe it travelled through, and then from his lungs back out. He looked back at his phone. The messages blared out at him. He didn’t know why they irked him. He was anti-those messages. But they upset him more than they should have. His fingers trembled over the phone. Ready to type out a response. A response that wasn’t his to give. But someone had to give it. And out of fear, normal, self preservative fear, regular people wouldn’t give that response. His eyes drooped. His head was heavy. A fly buzzed around his right ear. He swatted it with a snap from his thumb and forefinger. He looked up at the sun again and winced. Willing his eyes to stay open, to stare at the sun that seemed to get red and turn to yellow, and then blinding white. He closed his eyes, looked back at his phone. On the other side of his eyelids, everything looked a warm red. And when he opened them, he saw specks of light in his vision like particles of dust suspended right in front of his eyes.

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They had consumed him. It had felt like they were tearing him from within the flesh. The burning sensation had been horrendous. He didn’t admit it to them, and they were too dumb to understand, but he replayed those moments in his head from time to time. He had often wondered why he had been chosen. He also knew. But at the same time, there were thousands of others like him. He had travelled the world. Seen them. Manipulated them. So why had been chosen from among the lowest of humanity? They had consumed him. It had burnt him up from inside. His flesh had felt like it was being seared, and in that pain cane another feeling. A smug satisfaction. Yes, he was burning. But so were all these others. There was something else, a growing darkness, a dread. There was definitely something else. A darkness, a dread, a power. Others on this planet, they suffered. And that brought him great joy.

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He edged ever closer to them. He was sure which it was. One second it looked like one, the other, like another. He was now dangerously close to it. To its credit, it did not sway. Of course, the cargo should be reason enough for the cages to be fixed on tightly. But here, it was never enough. Never reason enough. He was dangerously close to it. All it had to do was to brake a little harder than was polite. Bump. That’s what would happen. From here, he noticed that it was alive. It was not asleep. The eyes were half shut, is why it had looked that way to him. It was drowsy. Not for one second had he considered that it was drowsy because this was still predawn. What was more likely was that it was tired, and had given up. He averted his eyes. Tried to. They wouldn’t leave the cages. They looked like they had enough space. When he looked closer, he saw that they were so tightly crammed that… well, he started to feel constructed, and the effects of claustrophobia just thinking about it. Bike started to form in his throat. His lungs started to beat faster. His heartbeats rose. He felt the walls of his car caving in. He went around, all this had taken less than a few minutes, mine yoh. He went around, not willing to let this sight go just yet. He stayed level with the car, and the cages filled with these poor creatures. Another had a neck jutting out limply, a ragdoll as the car moved over speed breakers. He sighed and drove on.

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Deep below the lowest trenches, the deepest points on planet earth, there was silence. The waters were still. The fish were still. Down here, where it was so cold, fish did not swim. Unless they had to. They conserved energy. Down here, where there was so much pressure, they had developed a hardness that was unique to them and nothing else on the planet. Not even diamonds. Millions of tons of saltwater were pressing down on this place. It was still. There was no light. It was so deep that the fish they had lanterns attached to their bodies did not exist, could not exist here. The ones here’s had no eyes. They had very sensitive scales. They could detect movement from miles away. Vibrations. Food. From no activity, there was suddenly a flurry of it. Fish that had been so still, you wouldn’t have seen them, even in the brightest light, began to rise from the ocean floor. All of them rose. Up and up.

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He sat in the car and wept. The twinkling of the lights outside became brighter. The shadows dancing around his car became more excitedly rapid. He looked at the boy. What was the difference between the child on the street, and him in his fancy clothes, and fancy car. A matter of birth? A matter of circumstance? He had turned the boy into himself. Why? To what end? He didn’t know. He hated himself. He looked at the boy, and felt twin wells of sorrow and guilt rising inside himself. The child was huddled over beside a wall and from his vantage point, Azazil could figure out that he was counting all the money he had received today. Having done that, the boy proceeded to leave. A knock on his window startled Azazil, he looked out. A man motioning him to roll down the window. He hardened his gaze, turned the key in his ignition, felt that his car was lighter tonight, for some reason. He pushed down the window just an inch. “Do you have a match?” The man mimicked a cigarette. Azazil was confused. What?

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The thunder screeched. The rajah was back at Ground Zero. The black and white squares seemed to have dust swirling around them. It began to rain. It avoided the small invisible dome around the board and the players. It turned yellow and sizzled and burnt as it touched the shadow rajah. He put back his head, chest out, face facing the sky, and let out a magnificent roar. His chest rose and deflated. The shadows around him scrambled, and then sped inwards towards him, seemingly absorbed by him. He didn’t change size, he didn’t get bigger, but he felt scarier, more frightening. The board let out a radiant purple light. By the glow of its light, the world seemed mancing, scary. Frightening. Everything was upset. The order was all upset.

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The thunder raged on. Screaming. Wild. Ferocious. Terrifying. The shadows stood to attention and watched. They were still. Something momentous was happening. They couldn’t explain it. But they had felt a ripple through the world. Humans wouldn’t. Humans were too solid, too thick. The shadows did. They couldn’t explain what it was. Maybe their rajah could. But he wasn’t here. They had heard his bellow. His scream. And some had wanted to rush towards him. But his orders kept them rooted in place. So they didn’t. They stood and they watched. This was their purpose until it was all over. They stood and watched. The board was glowing a purple. And then a golden. And then a purple color. As if animated by some internal light. Some heart blood. Something. It was unnerving. But it didn’t seem to have an effect on the bodies that were now just mere husks of the men they had once been. The wind whipped the invisible dome all around them. It was so strong, and they looked so frail, that one felt that if it touched them, they would surely burst into dust and fall to the ground. As they raised their arms, and moved their fingers to grab and change the positions of the pieces on the board, it seemed as if it took more effort than they could have. Wrap some bandages around them, and they would not be too dissimilar to the cartoons that had once shown ancient Egyptian mummies.

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The car roared through the streets. Then it slowly stopped. Not a full stop. It was just slower, the engine quieter. He was listening to his sound. The music. He glanced in the rear view. Enough space. He looked in front of him. A motorcycle. The wife, looking pissed, wearing a head covering. Sitting perched on one side of it. How they managed to do that, he didn’t know. So much balance was required. The man in front of them looked bored. His hair was sparse above his forehead and grew denser and thicker as it reached the back of his skull. Past him, the driver could make out a tuft of thick hair. He gave the motorcycle a wide berth. They didn’t have rear view mirrors.

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The maze was wide and narrow. The shrubs grew hot and heavy. In the darkness, you couldn’t tell what color they were. Which was just as well. They were not any color that would be considered natural. But they had been born here. They had grown up here. They had been lovingly raised here by a being just like you or I. And yet he wasn’t. Heart of gold when he was raising them. And yet it wasn’t. Some might consider him one of the worst people to have ever lived.

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