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Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station
It was late in the night, too late. Anyone who had a place in the world was already in it. Everyone else was shifting, in one queue or another. The train like a coil shifting in the dark, the dark of the earth shifting against vacant space, the space shifting in its own vacancy. Like memory shifts every time it’s wrenched into language. The platform a rectangular slab of white light, silhouettes slicing it drown in crumbs and murmurs. I was arguing on the phone with the girl I loved. I don’t remember the specifics. All I know is I wasn’t where I wanted to be. Shifting, from one phrase to another — trying to make it work, to win the argument without collateral damage. She was too. We both had a place in the world and we were locked outside of it. And there was a hole in the wall. You could put your eye in the socket and blur out the peripherals. Zone in on a loneliness like that of stagnant water. Suspended from the ceiling fans of an unnamed house tilted into the light. The soil shifting, the asphalt eating itself. You could see through room after room after room before your eyes hit a dead end — some God splattered on the wall in a last ditch attempt to fix a dent beyond repair. Electronic clarion of time stamps hovering across the night sky like a prayer and a child turned to his mother expecting a summation. To pile it all in a neat assemblage. So that the world, this world of rancour and light, spilling over itself like a reckless wound, would become familiar again.
night ripped wide open
across the sewer, a stain
dreamed of kissing the dew.
Abhinav is from Kanpur, India. His work has appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, trampset, Chestnut Review, Fahmidan Journal, and The Deadlands Magazine among other forums. He is also a Best of the Net Nominee.
