“On her desk is a glowing thing, and I don’t know what it is. It makes my eyes prickle. It’s as if a flame was perfectly circular- it has a pinpoint nexus so deeply, breathtakingly black I can’t look at it, shreds and filaments of light shifting across it in a delicate orbit; so painfully delicate, so beautiful, like oil on water on fire, given exploding luminance – all white gold; edged with colors I have never seen before.”
“Devour your soul?” I scoffed, hoping that he may perceive it as amusement passing through my form. “Arthur, that’s such an archaic concept, and frankly, inefficient. The energy output from ‘soul devouring’ is negligible, and the clean-up is a lot of work. No, I’m here because my transit request was misfiled. And, now, thanks to your rather… enthusiastic reaction, I’m likely to be subjected to further administrative penalties.”
“The ritual would begin with any of them taking the first bite, however, each of them waited for the other to take the first plunge. The woman in blue nudged the man in crimson. The man in green politely asked for permission to dig in. Permission was granted, as everyone else leaned into the city with greed and anticipation.”
“Your daughter is fair, like doodh malai. My Usman had to fall in love with that dark witch. Aah, my wretched luck,” she wipes the sewage-green goo trickling down her eyes. It sticks and spreads across her cheeks. “What have I done to deserve all this? All that is left is for lightning to strike me at this moment.”
“You came into this world with Eve, in separate bodies of symmetrical brilliance. Before the fragility of your innocence slipped from the crevices between your fingers, I placed you into the palm of my garden. I couldn’t let Earth have you first. I admit, my intentions were never pure. I put you down in separate bodies, so the body heat wouldn’t clash against body heat, so you wouldn’t kill her like I killed her.”
“Screams were part of the natural soundscape of this Bazaar, this odd blink of a place that sat squat and sprawling beneath the sewers of Crimson City. Here, the holy gloss of the City’s lacy streets was absent. Here, the glistening towers and benevolent gods gave way to smugglers who sold pestilence and madams who entrapped demons.”
“Speculative short stories, novellas and books, published by South-Asian authors, from April to June 2025.”
“With each fantastic voyage into the work of a south Asian speculative fiction writer, we devised new ways of capturing and representing the weirdness that we discovered. New stories meant new tags to accommodate the fusion of languages, genres, and settings.”