Fiction

Newton didn’t totally hate this place. He traipsed through the brome field with his fishing pole and tackle box. The grass stalks tickled his arms as the humid yellow haze lifted and the edges of the Kansas sky turned purple.

“They put those little white markers out to show where the graves are.”

“I thought they slaughtered horses.”

The process is transparent, time-honoured, tried-and-tested. That’s why it’s safe.

Doña Anastasia walks with two men wearing suits along wooden planks in the drenching heat of Lago de Maracaibo. To each side, lines of small palafitos sit on stilts a meter and a half above the water.

One summer, when I was nine, my father bought a used car. A battered red Volvo, from a friend-of-a-friend. The boxy kind with a deep, rectangular boot.

The day Ishmail scavenged a pink fifty-rupee note from the municipal refuse vat, his mother was having one of her spells. Clutching her elbows, her threadbare saree wrapped loosely around herself, Rashida was weeping.