The Bangalore Review

You find a spot a few feet away from the pool. As you stomp on the shovel you are surprised at how sad you feel, but a momentary lapse causes you to consider rushing the burial so you can get back to the pool and go home, which only replaces the original sadness with an agonizing guilt.

I look outside from my tall window in the living room. Our living room is small, and the big window helps because it gives you a sense of spaciousness. I see fields that are green and yellow and trees far away. Their leaves have started to fall because it’s autumn.

She didn’t like how he kept calling her Myna. She had told him as much, but he persisted. It made her feel small and invalidated, like a gregarious little bird of her namesake, which always needed protection. She had resisted calling herself Myna, it seemed to lend her insignificance.

We do not know what subject Naveed Bhai studied in university, but when he got out, he asked his father to wire him a small amount of money, which he invested in a shop in a strip mall in Alief. Actually, a friend of his father suggested the business to him, accompanied him to the site and negotiated the purchase of the shop.

Anne is not efficient. The date of the closing is set, and she needs to be out. It is as cruel and simple as that.

I frown, miraculously suppressing an impulse to laugh. Is my father going crazy? How come I haven’t noticed a sign although we are living, separately, under the same roof?

Animals in the area had begun to grow hands, opposable thumbs in fact, while the rest of their bodies remained the same. They’d heard bobcats and coyotes howling off in the distance, maybe on the now mostly abandoned golf course.

Then it struck her. “Why, I’ve taken the Lord into my heart. That’s it. I should have realized.”