Tag: Life

Taxidermists

On By Rijul BallalIn Fiction1 Comment

We are a family of collectors. We have diverse interests and collect many things- perfume bottles, magazines from the soviet union, yellow pages for cities that don’t exist anymore. Even seeds. In the summer we often catch fireflies and lost flowers. The flies are pinned up in memories, the flowers in books- so many of them. All for a personal library that began decades ago. Yellow books that’ll never be used, no one can write over flowers and perfumed paper.

So much for memories I guess, but you won’t me writing on those pages either.

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Back then

On By Rijul BallalIn PoemLeave a comment

All I remember

The sound of tea
being poured

While wool

Disguised as fog
climbs up
closing the windows
The tick of the clock

interrupts.

My neighbors cage

On By Rijul BallalIn Non-fictionLeave a comment

Bird cages become terrible things if you think about them. They seem to come from a ancient manors covered in dust and with white drappings over furniture. When empty there’s a soft melancholy that comes with rusted, black bars that might break if you pushed hard. A swing is just more lonely when there isn’t a bird on it.

Putting a bird in won’t makes things much better. I’m not one for heavy handed metaphors but it’s hard to image any contentment coming from anything that could claim the entire sky, being restricted to a tiny cage. It’s damnation. Insanity for birds and condemning man to be a callous and unfeeling thing, amused by petty, pretty suffering. Color the cage with your own horrid indifference, the bird might not have much time for you either.

My neighbors either poets or masters of atrocity have gone a step further. In their grotesque tower that looms over the entire neighborhood they got a cage on the highest floor. Rather than put any birds in their cage, they’ve found themselves a better metaphor- they’ve caged light. In a corner they’ve wasted for a concrete, meaninglessly stylized balcony that no one can reach they’ve put a solitary light bulb that’s lit for no one in particular.

In fact I don’t think anyone would bother to look that far beyond the trees, street lights and other squalor all the way up a rich mans house. Maybe they think it looks good no matter how futile; another ornate holding for us to want. I’m not sure they’d take much notice of it themselves so there it glows, in an uninterrupted darkness. Unseen and meaningless, trapped above us all.

Funeral Atmosphere

On By Rijul BallalIn FictionLeave a comment

For the life of me I’ll never figure out why they had to hold a service in a place so overwhelmed with the smell of varnish.

It felt like the carpenter, filled with hate, decided to show his displeasure through the wood- smacking it down with layer after layer of varnish. His presence was heavy and recent just like the smell. I suppose when you’re weeping and listening to comforting voices, you don’t pay much attention to your nose. Not like people bother sniffing out trouble on finer days either.

The smell took me back to an old memory, where while helping around the house I was tasked with coating old furniture with new layers of varnish. It was help by virtue of me not being able to get in the way of actual work but I liked it none the less. The smell so artificial and powerful was pleasant. The nature of varnish in it’s liquid form added to the effect, so like water, but faster to flow and evaporate. So delicate you’d think it’s valuable.

I was working on a phone stand, one that still had it’s twisted, crunched and swelled shape as a tree trunk, you’d think it was alive if it wasn’t for it’s branches that had been cut off so you could put phones and phonebooks on it. I never bothered to get the dust out of the crannies, I figured no one would bother to check.

The memory ended when another waft made me gag. My neighbor leaned over to share his dispare, I only told him that it was good, very good that he felt something.