Ranbir Sidhu

stories

The woman's mouth was round and soft, a glazed doughnut of a mouth smeared in scarlet frosting, and I imagined her lips clamped to my chest - they were a suction cup, leaving only a ring of red and a vacuum to separate us. Then she said something which, had I been listening, would have disturbed me. Instead I was only half-listening. I never watched this tail-end news. The sportscast was over and all that was left were the human interest stories. Instead this woman's lips were stuck to my chest, her saliva dripped through the TV screen and found a natural home in the jungle of my nipple hairs. I only heard the words breaking news as an aside to her teeth biting my nipple, only caught the splintered bodies falling from the plane in the reflection on an imagined ruby blood bead as her teeth pierced my skin. Sikh terrorists, she said. My hand found my crotch, and slowly, I unzipped my pants.

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THE CONSUL'S WIFE

He looked peaceful, Parvati thought, the way Arjuna was drowsing, coiled so tightly around the clawed base of the hall lamp. The previous week, when Krishna, Parvati's husband, had told her he was retiring, she had thought of Arjuna, of whether he might like traveling to India. Since then she had studied Arjuna's scales more closely, trying to gauge his moods, his desires, trying to decide whether India would really be the place for him. He seemed so happy here, though, so unperturbed and unperturbing.