Grilled Retard Says

I could hear the fluid draining off and the alien glucose flowing profusely through my veins. My father was lying dead to the world on the sofa while his restless eyes had their gaze fixed on me. I couldn't sleep. The cannula prevented me from leaning sideways. The doctors had failed to diagnose my illness, the tests and the machines only added to the expenditure. I wanted to cry but feared that it would wake my father. All I could do was to stare at the wall clock, waiting for the nurse to come and pull out the foreign tube from my body so I could catch some Zs. Every day, she would collect a blood specimen for different tests. My hands had become a resort where the needles came for recreation. A part of me would leave the body and accumulate in an injection tube. I had never been hospitalised before. It was like a prison cell, the room had consumed me. The medicines did make me feel better after three days of my admission, but I had suffered mentally. The sight of my mother fa...

Life has failed you. You’re caught in a labyrinth. Every turn inside the maze would lead to the door that won’t open. The paths betray you. The lampposts give no light. The grass would concoct a plot to ambush the feet. Your shadow trails behind you like the oil leaking out from the fleeing Bentley. The friends who had visited you in the hospital with corsages and unfaithful wishes would stab you to a putrid death with the birthday knife. But the crystal ball doesn’t show you dead. There’s something that leads you to the door time and again. The barren lands haven’t given up on the clouds that tease the thirsty earth and obscure the sun. The sun just won’t die. The lights will penetrate the proud mass of water. Without faith, the easiest climb is most difficult to scale. Pick yourself up and look at the sky. Lose yourself to the music and the lyrics will start to make sense. The doorknob will drop by the wayside. You were marooned on the island where no ships dock. Start bu...

Life has failed you. There’s pain on the inside, the veins swirled like leaves in the autumn wind. Distraught with fury, you push the blood upstream; rummage through the debris and look for the scarred photographs. You can smell the ashes from the cremation, the memories that seemed eternal burned down. You’re detached like a rock on the island where no ships dock and the laughing sea is static. Shreds of your spirit sail through the malicious air. You follow the lying map to the last oasis in the perpetual desert, only to find a dry crater and the echoes of archaic skeletons. The soul is held fast to the flesh. You wish for a divorce, but the prayers betray you. It doesn’t come to you. Death had never been desired so profoundly. Death had never been so unkind.

A child who wears a dirty shirt, the only one he has, to school is made fun of by his rich classmates. He avoids social gatherings, parties and any such function where he is supposed to wear apparels other than his school dress. His mother died when he was eleven. His father barely manages to make both ends meet. He has taught himself to never dream. He has curbed his wants. A mother who can’t allow her daughter, who she loves more than life itself, to take part in a singing competition. Her husband had beaten her when she had once allowed her daughter to attend a birthday party of a male friend. The friend was generous enough to drop her back home in his car safely. The father didn't seem to like it. He obtruded his rage on the mother. She now has learned to live with her husband's little idiosyncrasies. A father who returns home after having worked monotonously for long hours, only to find his son being taken into custody by the cops for having molested a girl. He h...