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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Survival / Success
- Subject: Horror / Scary
- Published: 08/09/2013
The Break
It was really awkward. It was a Sunday and they were having breakfast together. Prateik, his sister Nidhi and their parents had somehow entangled their daily routine by coincidentally waking up all at the same time. Now that the confusion about the priority to use the bathroom had been settled with much difficulty all four found themselves ending up at the breakfast table at the same time.
“Well! A nice family breakfast! Long time!” said Preetilata, the mother, with a smile heightened to mask her astonishment at having to cook puris for four stomachs which she had long since abandoned as a habit.
“Mmmm…yo faiv if!” mumbled Somnath, the father, almost choking himself with a mouthful.
Nidhi however was not much perturbed by this alteration. She was yet to come out of her Saturday night break ups as she sat with a morsel in one hand while texting vigorously with another.
Prateik sat with reluctance. He was not used to so much noise and so many faces at the table. In fact he barely remembered when he last took his food at the table. He would either eat out, or take his plate into his room. It was not particularly hatred but boredom for which he avoided eating with his family. He was tired by their fake and insincere discussions.
However, he suddenly felt an irresistible urge to go for a leak. It is one of those moments when the preoccupied senses suddenly realize that something is at the brim and needs to be relieved at once. He excused himself, though he immediately realized that nobody actually cared. As he pushed his chair back, his mother suddenly remembered something in the kitchen which needed her immediate attention and ran for it. His father stood up and went to the balcony to make sure if someone was calling him from downstairs. His sister slipped into her room as there was a notification from her facebook account which needed to be viewed with utmost urgency.
Prateik felt a burning sensation at the tip of his penis. Having urinated, he carefully examined his penis and found nothing extraordinary. He avoided fondling with it not to risk an erection. He patted his penis lightly to obey his command and to go to sleep, zipped his pants and came out.
And a tremendous silence deafened him for a moment.
He could hear the kitchen tap dripping, the motor humming inside the refrigerator, the tick tocks from all the three clocks in the flat; at a point he realized that he could hear the wind too. He hastened into the kitchen, rammed into his sister’s room and reached sweating and panting at the balcony. The sounds followed him still with altered pressure and nobody, not a single soul could be seen or heard.
It all seemed so absurd. But what was more absurd was that Prateik believed what he saw. He saw dogs loitering on the streets, sparrows and crows flying around without any purpose, a line of ants on the wall of their balcony. Those were all the movements which met his eyes. He heard no car honking, no cries of street vendors, no loud televisions from the neighbours, no sounds of hammering or drilling from the construction site nearby, and above all there was no sound of the imagined conversations which filled this world in billions. The real silence is much more silent than imagined.
The fact that his parents and his sister had vanished did not give him much trouble. A personal loss sits heavily on the heart; a general loss eases the pain. There was simply nobody, not a single human soul on the planet. He was alone. The only man mysteriously left behind after a mass evacuation. Prateik was only half easy with the situation. That he might never be able to see any of his near ones, smile or laugh with them, fight with them or feel safe and cared for seemed not to be of much importance to him, and what truly troubled him was his utter nonchalance towards this predicament.
Prateik went in and sank into the couch in the living room. He needed to think now. What did all this mean? What had he to do? He knew how to cook and thus he could feed himself so there went the question of survival down the pipe. Then, mere survival could not be the sole cause for living. Or was it? What would he do now? He needed to go to work, but what for? He hadn’t to earn his living from someone since there wasn’t anyone to grant him such. He could write or sing or paint and spend his time doing all those creative things which he discarded for lack of time and support. But who would he create for? There wasn’t anyone to applaud. He could fall in love, but who with? He could make love, but what with?
Prateik felt an irresistible urge to disrobe. He took off his tee shirt and slid down his pants and went in front of the mirror. He could not recall the last time he had seen himself naked, flawless, beautiful. He wondered how many times his parents and his sister saw themselves naked. He disliked his sister. She was a prude and he hated such girls who would pick boyfriends up like picking random books from a library with no intension to read. However, he wondered whether his sister had a sexual life. Did she sleep with these boys or would she save herself for the rich NRI engineer with whom she’d be hooked after she had her romantic excesses purged from her system? Strangely, before this Prateik wouldn’t think of his sister in that light. He did not consciously spare a thought about what his parents did in their bed room. But this was a strange time. The values which he was taught meant nothing in the absence of those to whom they were related. He could freely ask uncomfortable questions because there was no one to provide him with answers.
Prateik went into his sister’s room, lied down facing the ceiling and tried to get an erection. He could not. He wondered why. If there was no one to question his moral then why couldn’t he discard it completely? He looked at the ceiling fan and saw how distorted his face looked as it got reflected on its shining surface. That is what happens with reflected images, they are all lies. Men had invented moralities and distorted the truth like the convex surface of the fan. Now Prateik had to reside in the uncomfortable zone between truths and lies.
He stood up and thrust himself to a wall, and cried. He slipped down along the wall and sat crying, burying his head between his knees. As he cried, he wondered how long it had been since he had been really sad.
As Prateik stepped out of the house he had the most amazing feeling. It was like an infantile memory, there was a queer sense of alien familiarity in it. Shame had begun to take the backseat. The only human quality which surfaced in him was curiosity. Curiosity to experience the state before curiosity dawned in mankind. He ran to and fro on the lane, pissed upon a hydrant cover, threw pebbles to all the iron gates in the locality as if to create his own symphony of chaos. As he came to the four lane main road and lied down in the middle of the crossing he felt that no one can create ripples underwater.
The sky looked bluer than ever. Not a strip of cloud peeped from behind the tree silhouettes. Prateik looked up with a crinkled forehead and half opened eyes and could see only a single pair of wings, much larger in comparison to the expected trigonometric proportions circling the blue as if cutting a hole through it. He wondered whether his outlines were blurred by the glaring sun just like the tin shells of cars in the months of April and May. Occasional torrents of dust escaped from all the four deserted corners settling heavy on his sighs.
Suddenly he heard a growl loud and clear. He sat up and looked around. As the numbers increased he felt a chill in his spine. He had been surrounded by a group of hounds whose butter hued canines spoke of hunger. Prateik picked himself up and started retracing his steps back to home as the hounds grouped and followed. He looked straight at their eyes, shifting from each face to the other in seconds. As they gained speed he stopped and faked picking up a pebble. No one budged. They were hounds, not stray dogs. Prateik’s gut felt as if it was getting dissolved, his feet trembled like bee wings, his arms were hardened in tension and his fists were clenched so tough that his fingers would have dug deep into his palm had he sharp nails.
The leader of the pack started gaining on him. Prateik moved backwards with much agility. By the time he had reached the gate of his house the leader was almost sniffing his thighs. He kept his poise and smuggled himself into his apartment and closed the door softly on the face of a pack of eight to ten hounds waiting eagerly along the corridor.
Prateik did not know how long he had been sitting with his back against the front door. He had dozed off as a muffled fright slowly benumbed him. Fear settled into his nerves quite abruptly but with a thud. Fear of death is solely a personal emotion. The fear of suddenly not existing does not exist. In fact it is not at all fear. It is pity; pity at the self for the loss of all that one loves to hold on to. A man sleeps peacefully knowing that a gentle touch or a ringing alarm will bring him back to the world where he is sure that nothing will slip easily from his grip. Had there been arts to bring back the dead to life, men would have died in peace all the same.
Prateik sat through the evening among frequent gnarling sniffs and scrapings on the other side of the wooden plank.
As the evening ripened there were eight consecutive coos from the cuckoo hole. Prateik realized that it was dark. All the lights were out. Perhaps there was no one to run the power supply grid. Not a single speck of luminescence shone from any window or from any corner of the street. Prateik softly guessed his way into the kitchen to find a candlestick. As he lit the dusty creamy white stick of wax he saw something astounding. There was a zebra munching away from the vegetable basket.
He stepped outside into the drawing room. There were a few rabbits hopping away into the shadow of the massive LCD. An antelope in the balcony had his face stuck inside one of his underwears and was battling to get it off. A rhinoceros walked out of his sister’s room chewing upon a Pink Floyd poster and moved into his parents’ bedroom with an air of indifference. As Prateik stood there with a candle it seemed that nobody noticed his presence. Night approached gradually and the music of the crickets increased to a deafening extreme. There were shrieks of bats, distant howls of hounds or hyenas and occasional growls from behind the wooden front door. The feeble candle light befuddled the senses. Darkness ensures a different sort of vision. But a faint light confuses the other senses with a promise which it cannot keep a few feet away.
Prateik stormed into the bathroom and bolted the door from inside. It was the only territory which was not yet intruded into. The commotion in the corridor was gradually increasing. Prateik could feel that the corridor was now bustling with a thick crowd of hounds, wolves and hyenas. Some were busy breaking in while others were settling scores among themselves and arriving at a point of agreement about the shares of the human prey seated constricted inside the lavatory.
There was absolute chaos outside. Prateik felt that if he was to step out of the bathroom now he would probably find no place to stand. The apartment was surely stuffed with equatorial Africa. Prateik still had hopes that he could escape. In search of an emergency evacuation passage he peeped out of the bathroom window expecting a pipeline or something but to his amazement he saw only, as far as his vision could guide him a vast stretch of grave, still and deep water. The moon was loud. Full moon nights are exactly like sunny days seen through a very dark pair of lenses. There was not a whiff of breeze, the ocean laid like a sheet of aluminum foil. The waters were darker under the shade of the house and under that dark veil clumsy leviathan silhouettes swam about. Killer whales, sharks, and sword fish made their rounds and after a while a giant sting ray flapped around the premises. Swarms of jelly fish and squids shot across the house from below. Small phosphorescent creatures lit up the dark with eeriness. As Prateik sat on the commode with eyes on the water and ears towards the fastened door he saw a gigantic outline rising up from below with multiplying proportions. Almost immediately he heard a loud crack on the front door. It had been breached. Perhaps because the animals were breeding so fast that they needed more room and the door was coming in their way. Or perhaps it was busted by a group of bison who had a deal with the predators to let them in and feast upon soft and warm human flesh.
Out of the bathroom window there was a vast ocean and a titanic monster rising from the deep; on the other side of the bathroom door there were all sorts of animals breeding like hyperactive livestock and predators waiting to take a bite of him. Darkness and the candlestick were fighting an unequal war. Among howls and squeaks and a far deadlier silence spread across horizons Prateik closed his eyes tight and wished that this dream would end. He knew not for how long he stayed holding the bathroom door with one hand feeling the rustling of manes and scraping of horns on the other side and those hungry vicious pushes which grew more frequent with time. He just closed his eyes and hoped.
………………………………………………….
When Preetilata, Somnath and Nidhi came back to the table they too never found each other and each got trapped in the world each dreamed to live in.
The Break(gourab dutta)
The Break
It was really awkward. It was a Sunday and they were having breakfast together. Prateik, his sister Nidhi and their parents had somehow entangled their daily routine by coincidentally waking up all at the same time. Now that the confusion about the priority to use the bathroom had been settled with much difficulty all four found themselves ending up at the breakfast table at the same time.
“Well! A nice family breakfast! Long time!” said Preetilata, the mother, with a smile heightened to mask her astonishment at having to cook puris for four stomachs which she had long since abandoned as a habit.
“Mmmm…yo faiv if!” mumbled Somnath, the father, almost choking himself with a mouthful.
Nidhi however was not much perturbed by this alteration. She was yet to come out of her Saturday night break ups as she sat with a morsel in one hand while texting vigorously with another.
Prateik sat with reluctance. He was not used to so much noise and so many faces at the table. In fact he barely remembered when he last took his food at the table. He would either eat out, or take his plate into his room. It was not particularly hatred but boredom for which he avoided eating with his family. He was tired by their fake and insincere discussions.
However, he suddenly felt an irresistible urge to go for a leak. It is one of those moments when the preoccupied senses suddenly realize that something is at the brim and needs to be relieved at once. He excused himself, though he immediately realized that nobody actually cared. As he pushed his chair back, his mother suddenly remembered something in the kitchen which needed her immediate attention and ran for it. His father stood up and went to the balcony to make sure if someone was calling him from downstairs. His sister slipped into her room as there was a notification from her facebook account which needed to be viewed with utmost urgency.
Prateik felt a burning sensation at the tip of his penis. Having urinated, he carefully examined his penis and found nothing extraordinary. He avoided fondling with it not to risk an erection. He patted his penis lightly to obey his command and to go to sleep, zipped his pants and came out.
And a tremendous silence deafened him for a moment.
He could hear the kitchen tap dripping, the motor humming inside the refrigerator, the tick tocks from all the three clocks in the flat; at a point he realized that he could hear the wind too. He hastened into the kitchen, rammed into his sister’s room and reached sweating and panting at the balcony. The sounds followed him still with altered pressure and nobody, not a single soul could be seen or heard.
It all seemed so absurd. But what was more absurd was that Prateik believed what he saw. He saw dogs loitering on the streets, sparrows and crows flying around without any purpose, a line of ants on the wall of their balcony. Those were all the movements which met his eyes. He heard no car honking, no cries of street vendors, no loud televisions from the neighbours, no sounds of hammering or drilling from the construction site nearby, and above all there was no sound of the imagined conversations which filled this world in billions. The real silence is much more silent than imagined.
The fact that his parents and his sister had vanished did not give him much trouble. A personal loss sits heavily on the heart; a general loss eases the pain. There was simply nobody, not a single human soul on the planet. He was alone. The only man mysteriously left behind after a mass evacuation. Prateik was only half easy with the situation. That he might never be able to see any of his near ones, smile or laugh with them, fight with them or feel safe and cared for seemed not to be of much importance to him, and what truly troubled him was his utter nonchalance towards this predicament.
Prateik went in and sank into the couch in the living room. He needed to think now. What did all this mean? What had he to do? He knew how to cook and thus he could feed himself so there went the question of survival down the pipe. Then, mere survival could not be the sole cause for living. Or was it? What would he do now? He needed to go to work, but what for? He hadn’t to earn his living from someone since there wasn’t anyone to grant him such. He could write or sing or paint and spend his time doing all those creative things which he discarded for lack of time and support. But who would he create for? There wasn’t anyone to applaud. He could fall in love, but who with? He could make love, but what with?
Prateik felt an irresistible urge to disrobe. He took off his tee shirt and slid down his pants and went in front of the mirror. He could not recall the last time he had seen himself naked, flawless, beautiful. He wondered how many times his parents and his sister saw themselves naked. He disliked his sister. She was a prude and he hated such girls who would pick boyfriends up like picking random books from a library with no intension to read. However, he wondered whether his sister had a sexual life. Did she sleep with these boys or would she save herself for the rich NRI engineer with whom she’d be hooked after she had her romantic excesses purged from her system? Strangely, before this Prateik wouldn’t think of his sister in that light. He did not consciously spare a thought about what his parents did in their bed room. But this was a strange time. The values which he was taught meant nothing in the absence of those to whom they were related. He could freely ask uncomfortable questions because there was no one to provide him with answers.
Prateik went into his sister’s room, lied down facing the ceiling and tried to get an erection. He could not. He wondered why. If there was no one to question his moral then why couldn’t he discard it completely? He looked at the ceiling fan and saw how distorted his face looked as it got reflected on its shining surface. That is what happens with reflected images, they are all lies. Men had invented moralities and distorted the truth like the convex surface of the fan. Now Prateik had to reside in the uncomfortable zone between truths and lies.
He stood up and thrust himself to a wall, and cried. He slipped down along the wall and sat crying, burying his head between his knees. As he cried, he wondered how long it had been since he had been really sad.
As Prateik stepped out of the house he had the most amazing feeling. It was like an infantile memory, there was a queer sense of alien familiarity in it. Shame had begun to take the backseat. The only human quality which surfaced in him was curiosity. Curiosity to experience the state before curiosity dawned in mankind. He ran to and fro on the lane, pissed upon a hydrant cover, threw pebbles to all the iron gates in the locality as if to create his own symphony of chaos. As he came to the four lane main road and lied down in the middle of the crossing he felt that no one can create ripples underwater.
The sky looked bluer than ever. Not a strip of cloud peeped from behind the tree silhouettes. Prateik looked up with a crinkled forehead and half opened eyes and could see only a single pair of wings, much larger in comparison to the expected trigonometric proportions circling the blue as if cutting a hole through it. He wondered whether his outlines were blurred by the glaring sun just like the tin shells of cars in the months of April and May. Occasional torrents of dust escaped from all the four deserted corners settling heavy on his sighs.
Suddenly he heard a growl loud and clear. He sat up and looked around. As the numbers increased he felt a chill in his spine. He had been surrounded by a group of hounds whose butter hued canines spoke of hunger. Prateik picked himself up and started retracing his steps back to home as the hounds grouped and followed. He looked straight at their eyes, shifting from each face to the other in seconds. As they gained speed he stopped and faked picking up a pebble. No one budged. They were hounds, not stray dogs. Prateik’s gut felt as if it was getting dissolved, his feet trembled like bee wings, his arms were hardened in tension and his fists were clenched so tough that his fingers would have dug deep into his palm had he sharp nails.
The leader of the pack started gaining on him. Prateik moved backwards with much agility. By the time he had reached the gate of his house the leader was almost sniffing his thighs. He kept his poise and smuggled himself into his apartment and closed the door softly on the face of a pack of eight to ten hounds waiting eagerly along the corridor.
Prateik did not know how long he had been sitting with his back against the front door. He had dozed off as a muffled fright slowly benumbed him. Fear settled into his nerves quite abruptly but with a thud. Fear of death is solely a personal emotion. The fear of suddenly not existing does not exist. In fact it is not at all fear. It is pity; pity at the self for the loss of all that one loves to hold on to. A man sleeps peacefully knowing that a gentle touch or a ringing alarm will bring him back to the world where he is sure that nothing will slip easily from his grip. Had there been arts to bring back the dead to life, men would have died in peace all the same.
Prateik sat through the evening among frequent gnarling sniffs and scrapings on the other side of the wooden plank.
As the evening ripened there were eight consecutive coos from the cuckoo hole. Prateik realized that it was dark. All the lights were out. Perhaps there was no one to run the power supply grid. Not a single speck of luminescence shone from any window or from any corner of the street. Prateik softly guessed his way into the kitchen to find a candlestick. As he lit the dusty creamy white stick of wax he saw something astounding. There was a zebra munching away from the vegetable basket.
He stepped outside into the drawing room. There were a few rabbits hopping away into the shadow of the massive LCD. An antelope in the balcony had his face stuck inside one of his underwears and was battling to get it off. A rhinoceros walked out of his sister’s room chewing upon a Pink Floyd poster and moved into his parents’ bedroom with an air of indifference. As Prateik stood there with a candle it seemed that nobody noticed his presence. Night approached gradually and the music of the crickets increased to a deafening extreme. There were shrieks of bats, distant howls of hounds or hyenas and occasional growls from behind the wooden front door. The feeble candle light befuddled the senses. Darkness ensures a different sort of vision. But a faint light confuses the other senses with a promise which it cannot keep a few feet away.
Prateik stormed into the bathroom and bolted the door from inside. It was the only territory which was not yet intruded into. The commotion in the corridor was gradually increasing. Prateik could feel that the corridor was now bustling with a thick crowd of hounds, wolves and hyenas. Some were busy breaking in while others were settling scores among themselves and arriving at a point of agreement about the shares of the human prey seated constricted inside the lavatory.
There was absolute chaos outside. Prateik felt that if he was to step out of the bathroom now he would probably find no place to stand. The apartment was surely stuffed with equatorial Africa. Prateik still had hopes that he could escape. In search of an emergency evacuation passage he peeped out of the bathroom window expecting a pipeline or something but to his amazement he saw only, as far as his vision could guide him a vast stretch of grave, still and deep water. The moon was loud. Full moon nights are exactly like sunny days seen through a very dark pair of lenses. There was not a whiff of breeze, the ocean laid like a sheet of aluminum foil. The waters were darker under the shade of the house and under that dark veil clumsy leviathan silhouettes swam about. Killer whales, sharks, and sword fish made their rounds and after a while a giant sting ray flapped around the premises. Swarms of jelly fish and squids shot across the house from below. Small phosphorescent creatures lit up the dark with eeriness. As Prateik sat on the commode with eyes on the water and ears towards the fastened door he saw a gigantic outline rising up from below with multiplying proportions. Almost immediately he heard a loud crack on the front door. It had been breached. Perhaps because the animals were breeding so fast that they needed more room and the door was coming in their way. Or perhaps it was busted by a group of bison who had a deal with the predators to let them in and feast upon soft and warm human flesh.
Out of the bathroom window there was a vast ocean and a titanic monster rising from the deep; on the other side of the bathroom door there were all sorts of animals breeding like hyperactive livestock and predators waiting to take a bite of him. Darkness and the candlestick were fighting an unequal war. Among howls and squeaks and a far deadlier silence spread across horizons Prateik closed his eyes tight and wished that this dream would end. He knew not for how long he stayed holding the bathroom door with one hand feeling the rustling of manes and scraping of horns on the other side and those hungry vicious pushes which grew more frequent with time. He just closed his eyes and hoped.
………………………………………………….
When Preetilata, Somnath and Nidhi came back to the table they too never found each other and each got trapped in the world each dreamed to live in.
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