The Blood Tattoo

The tattoo gun danced on Jenny's skin. Her stomach tingled as the needle did its magic on her.

She closed her eyes and bit her lip, feeding on the strange pain that also turned her on. She felt the needle go in and out and in again, depositing the sweet color under her skin. Making something of nothing. She did not want it to stop. Ever.

The needle stopped pricking her and she opened her eyes.

"What happened?" she asked her tattoo artist.

The tattoo artist, a bald man with tattoos up to his neck, took off his face mask and wiped his face with a towel. 

"I think we're done for the day. I can't concentrate anymore." He put away his tattoo gun and called out to his assistant to clean up Jenny's tattoo.

Jenny waited impatiently as the assistant girl worked on the tattoo and finally gave her a thumbs up to leave.

This was Jenny's 7th visit to the tattoo parlor in last 8 weeks. The tattoo she was going for was a complex design. She had drawn it herself after looking into ancient books of blood. The design was all figures with ancient words written in them. With the tattoo on her skin, Jenny felt close to the darkness that had called out to her from her dreams. The thought of what she was doing made her shiver from inside. Some nights when she was alone in her room, she traced the lines of her tattoo with her fingers and spoke the words that were inscribed in her skin and then spoke some more words that were not part of the tattoo, yet. Once the incantations were complete, she waited. And he appeared. 

He always came whenever she called and he came under the garb of night. His face was black and so were his clothes. He could've been the night, a figment of imagination, but she remembered the touch of his fingers. Warm fingers that touched the lines on her tattoo and murmured the words, as if unsure. And every night, the figure stopped, tracing the lines of the tattoo, shook his head sadly and broke away like ripples in a still lake. Every night she was disappointed. She just wanted that tattoo to be complete. She wanted the dark stranger to take her with him. To whatever dark places he came from. She was not afraid of him. She was never afraid. She knew once her tattoo was complete, he'd stay the night with her and she'd persuade him to take her to the dark lands. 

She cried herself to sleep at times. 

Her visits to the tattoo parlor became more frequent. She pressurized the tattoo artist to work on her even though her skin was bleeding and torn from the tattoo gun's abuse. She thought of the pain as a gift from her dark god. Finally, after ten weeks of agony, the tattoo was complete. When she left the tattoo shop, broke and broken, but happy, she knew that tonight her dark god will become her lover and he'd love her forever because that's what forever is. 

In her bedroom that night, she moved her fingers across her freshly wounded stomach, whispering the words of the incantation that will open the doors to portals from other other side.This time, the portal opened and there were two figures in the doorway. Silhouetted by the red light, they walked up into her room. More than seven feet tall, both of them were identical in shape and size. Their eyes burned with a black glow that sucked the light from the room and suddenly made the room chilly. None of them was her dark god. 

They walked up to her bed and one of figures raised a scabbed, calloused hand and grabbed her neck. It lifted her up from the bed by sheer force as her feet kicked empty air and her throat choked out plaintive cries. 

"Please, please," Jenny coughed out.

The other figure bent down to examine the tattoo on her stomach. It touched the tattoo and dark blood welled out from the lines of the tattoo. The characters in her skin burned with a sulphuric intensity. Only one character stood out from the circle of words and letters that made no sense to any human eye. The demonic examiner grinned like a shark that has spotted its prey.

"There is a mistake in the incantation. Yes, there is a mistake. Heh, heh."

The other figure increased the pressure on Jenny's neck till it snapped in its fist like a rotten branch. The tattoo on her stomach kept leaking blood as life slowly ebbed out of her. 

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Ok, there might be some conceptual mistakes because I've never gotten a tattoo, so take it with a grain of sale. I've artistic license n all.

Yeah, let's start again. Let's wipe the old slate clean and begin something new and awesome.

She Kissed A Ghost

It was a night when dreams died silently in arms of lovers.

It had just rained. The streets were slick with reflections of open windows where couples fought and then made up in matter of hours.

Moon decided to show her face when the clouds parted. There was a slight twang of magic in the air.

The ghosts decided to prowl the streets. Looking for attention, love, excitement, fear or danger. Anything that would make them feel alive for just one second.

She was in one of the windows, looking down in the street. Her lover had gone off to sleep. The cigarette in her fingers let of tendrils of ghostly smoke that attracted one of the ghosts to the flaming orange ember. 

He floated up to her window. She looked through him and sent a puff of smoke swirling from her lips.

The ghost lusted. His form became visible for a precious few seconds.

She saw the face. He was a handsome one. Her hand grabbed his neck and pulled him closer.

Their lips met. Sparks sizzled and the air burned. Her toes tingled. And she floated out of the window. Slowly dissolving in the air.

Her cigarette fell in the room. One of the drapes caught fire.

Her lover never even got a chance to know what happened to her.

---

Fin.

An Update on State of Things

It's been some time since this place has seen any activity from my side. So, I just thought I'd drop in with an update on what all is up with me in general and on a greater level with this blog.

This is going to be some kind of ramble. The TL;DR version: Stories will be here soon.

The long version:

I've been in an unfocused fudge state for quite some time now. There were some stressful situations in real life that I had to deal with and as I grow older, I realize that life is not all that I dreamed it to be. But it is okay, life comes one day at a time and this is how we have to deal with it. I've had a lot to deal with, from personal life to professional life and to some degree the spiritual life too. I don't know to what degree I am spiritual but there are some things that one has to believe in. Things that happen. Signs that will show when you're looking for them. Things that happens just because you want them to happen. That sort of magical mystical bullshit.

It's all cyclical.

When you see history repeat itself for the fifth or sixth time around, that's when you realize that there is some kind of cosmic joke at play. It's all weird. We fall into habits that are difficult to get out of and even when we know that those habits are harming us, we can't help but indulge ourselves in those habits.

This is about being unfocused.

Back when I was studying, there used to be electricity in the air. The atmosphere was charged because we were all so young and full of ideas and that daring exuberance of youth that makes you feel you're immortal. But once you get out of study life, you're just another cubical monkey. Because the money is okay, pay is on time and the job doesn't really bore the fuck out of you. But you're just treading water. Just staying afloat, not really moving. Nothing flows here. It's just a stagnant pool of water. But it's okay, because the money is okay. It's on time.

I don't think I'll be wrong in saying this, but everyone we meet or interact with will stop us from living our life the way we want to live. You want to take off your clothes and play Hotel California on a guitar in the middle of the busiest market in your city, so many people will stop you, no matter how ridiculous your wish is.

So, this and that.

About the future of the blog


I read some of the past few posts here, about the android phones and shit and I thought to myself, Pallav, dude, wtf is that shit. So yeah, i disgust and disappoint myself with alarming regularity, but i am shameless enough to not care. I've been writing on a personal basis. Another long story project, about a city in future where all kinds of weird shit happens and yeah, that's pretty much about it. I am also editing a collection of old short stories and after that another editing task looms on my head. With all this editing, it's difficult to scrap out writing time for new short stories.

But I've got plans for that too.

So, yeah, that's pretty much it. I'll ramble more on some other blog maybe.

Stories, soon.

The Waiting

The people at the metro station were waiting for the next coach. 

A boy with his face firmly focused on his cell phone screen was waiting for an app to refresh and display new data. 

A girl with earphones plugged firmly in her head (disconnected from everything around her) was lazily waiting for her favorite song to play on her mp3 player. 

A man from a dead-end office job was waiting for his wife to reach the metro station on the arriving coach.

The clock counted down till the coach reached the station. 

The air pressure in the station changed as the train got closer to the station. 

Brakes screeched. People rushed forward to reach the gates first, even before they had opened.

The people inside the metro coach waited.

The doors didn't open.

The people inside and outside kept staring at each other.

The coach slowly started to move. 

Everyone moved behind the yellow line and started to wait for the next coach.

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What is this one about?

Waiting, what else. We spend so much time waiting for things. And some times those things are not worth it.

Like love, for example.

The Last Clown

The circus was empty. The only sound was of the clown crying in the ring. The man in clown makeup howled long and hard. He was sad that he had no audience. Not any more after the bombs had fallen.

He had survived somehow. But the emptiness in the world depressed him so every evening he put on his clown makeup and tried with varying degrees of failure to entertain his invisible audience.

The stalls were gathering dust. But the clown danced on. He was sitting in his chair in middle of the ring one when a massive heart attack tripped his body's machinery out of gear.

He flopped on the ground like a fish out of water when he saw scaled feet on the ground in front of his face.

"Last of the humans." The first voice said.

'Too bad that he's dying."

"It's funny."