Voyage: An Introduction

He had made a small hut beside the sea. On days of the tide, the sea would stretch to the place his home was. He had made two doors on the opposite sides of the wall – one from which the sea came in; the other, it went out. On these days he had plenty of sea creatures passing through his home. Some of these he really loved to watch whilst he sat on his bed – like the gray crabs, jellyfishes, fishermen and a few ships from the distant land. He had learnt quite a few languages from the foreigners on the different ships; found a few friends in the sailors who would pass in through his hut every now and then with their ships.

One day it started to rain and it didn’t stop. After a few days or perhaps, months, he found a huge ship coming in through his door.

“Which land are you coming from?” he asked them in different languages.

“Land?” they replied, surprised,  “There’s no land. The rain’s taken it all. We live in different ships. Each a country.”

So, the world started coming in through one of his door and going out of the other.

After he died, people claimed he was the greatest voyager of all times.

A Worm’s Pilgrimage

[This piece is not to be read by the weak-hearted]

One fine morning, living inside his worsening illness, he had been unmindful, the viruses of nostalgia, finding his body perfectly weak, captured him. And he went thinking how she used to bring the aroma of magic to heal his diseases. And he wished, like any lover does in his ailment, that she would again transmogrify his pains away and that she would come back to him from so far away like lightening does.

She didn’t, but the doctor did. The doctor told, after his check-up, that there was a worm inside him and prescribed a few medicine.

One fine morning, waking on her warm, cosy bed she found that her ailment had vanished. And she found a worm had climbed outside her mouth and was now slowly vanishing outside her window.