Tomic Riter

Tag: story

  • My future here ends soon.

    A plan to go outside but now the heavy downpour has ruined it. Another evening spent almost alone dreaming of beer, buying beer, not drinking beer. For money, people would kick anybody. Rode a mile on the dented roads that are filling with rainwater since two days. No song in the air, no men on the roadsides. No fruitsellers. No flesh hanging by the hook. ‘Are things going to get better?’ a man asked me in the morning. ‘I don’t know, Maybe day after tomorrow. I really don’t know. Things are fine with me,’ I said. People were always in shit, only now they are able to see how bad the situation is. I am tired of teaching anybody anything. People see when they want to see. Until then, they live blind to everything. So I took a walk from work to home all alone, watching the clouds and meditating on the possibility of a black rain and hence, a wasted night. The butcher has already chopped himself. The carpenter has chiseled his own thighs, The electrician, unable to swallow wires, is banging on doors, begging people to offer him something defective. Everything is farce. People do things just for the sake of doing them. Their spirit wants to invest in something else. They are mad for something else. They are stuck with this and that and then they tell everybody, ‘That’s life.’ That’s not life.That’s philosophy. Another threat delivered to me in the evening via an electronic medium, ‘Do this or your future here is grim.’ I know my future here is grim. I have not future here. I stand no chance among these idiots. My future here ends soon and I hope it does. I have got other, more important things to do. I know where my future it and it’s not much of a nice place.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • It rained like hell.

    Slow burn in my chest and a harmless warmth spreads. Balls of wet rice jammed inside a sleek plastic container. I look down and towards the container that can still contain and remain sealed and it doesn’t move and a German madman is blowing his crooked trumpet in my eardrums and I am almost dizzy and falling down but I try to hold on to the arms of my chair as I listen to the screams of dissatisafaction and the clouds of gloom gather and rain and rain on everything outside and submerge everything including roads and ants and dirty pigs and whatnot. I take another sip of the golden tumbler syrup and wait for a knock on my front door. But no knock. Has it been forgotten that I am to be visited? I do not think so. There must be a knock. Now. Or now. Soon. Tonight. Tonight’s knock on my door and it cannot be forgotten. In dark, the reflection is seen in a still gathering of rainwater that slipped into my home through the backdoor that leads to the balcony that I do not know is how much wet and smelling of foul things. I want to step outside but I cannot. There’s stuff to buy and cigarettes to smoke and a whole lot of rotten vegetables to throw outside but nothing is happening and the German madman has fallen quiet and now is some American hopeless brother of piss pissing out of his mouth and his albums are selling record high and I cannot believe that something like this is happening and happens quite regularly. Like always, some prick is at the top of the world and the good ones are crouching in some corner with their own bloody asses crammed inside their own mouths and they are preparing diligently each day in giving up altogether, hoping it all ends soon.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • An asshole for no reason.

    I dwell in the lowest strata of society. While I was about to leave, the asshole called out my name. I was on a call, a useless call with a middle aged woman and we were not talking about why things go the way they go and other trivial matters. The asshole didn’t notice I was on a call or maybe he did and decided to continue to be an asshole and shouted my name while standing right behind me. I was sitting on my revolving chair and looking at the screen in front of me and there was a pen in my hand. Its cap got lost some time ago. It is running out of ink. The ink is blue in colour and blue was the pen cap but now it is gone. I have other pens that have caps and the lady spoke for about 15 minutes or so and I spoke for about 5 minutes and then I cut the call saying Thank You because I had nothing else to say at the end of that call and I was definitely not thankful to her for anything. She said what she was programmed to say and my responses were civil and they sent me in immediate shock but I continued to talk normally and listen to her standard gibberish.  The asshole stood behind me and coughed and cleared his throat all that while like he was sick or something. Men like him don’t ever fall sick. They only take advantage of their aging to fool the young ones and throw them in the grinder. The asshole didn’t care what I was speaking about and to whom I was speaking. It rained heavily outside and I was pretty tired by that time and wanted a drink and it looked like it would rain a lot more and I couldn’t not think about not being able to go to the beer shop and replenish my stock. The revolving chair came last year and since then, it has been revolving but not as much I thought it would. I cut the call and revolved 180 degrees and looked towards the asshole and it was really him standing there and he hadn’t moved an inch from his place of standing. He was standing like he had something important to say. I looked the asshole in his eyes but said nothing. It was time to leave for home.

    ‘Search a name,’ the asshole said pointing his index finger at the screen in front of me. I said nothing and did the search. He didn’t want anything with the name or that man whose name it was. You can be an asshole for no reason. The asshole wrote down the name and his cellphone number on a scrap of white paper with a pen that too had blue ink and then he walked away a little and then turned and walked to me and then he turned again and finally walked away and out of the room. I packed my things which were nothing much and I left some time later. The screen blipped to black. The loud beep of UPS batteries continued echoing inside the dead room, hinting at the absence of men and their voices.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • In a day dream and whatever followed it.

    I am asleep. Sleeping sideways. Were my eyes open I would be looking left. My heart is a boombox. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. In dream I went somewhere. In sleep I probably dreamed. I went to meet a man. I know him and I know all the others who performed in my dream. It’s strange how strangers never appeared in my dream. We were sitting around a table. We were talking about me. Ridiculous! I told a man, ‘Hey! You have grown fatter!’ He smiled and said, ‘Yeah, it’s the job. What to do.’ He didn’t ask me anything. Nobody did. I can’t remember anything else, only that everybody was wearing clothes, nobody naked. I had to go somewhere else but I guess I ended up there. A cup of tea doesn’t seem to be enough. My heart is going BOOM BOOM BOOM. Is it my end? I could open my eyes but I don’t. I wait for the end and then turn to my right, my eyes still closed. It’s some time past midday. There’s light outside but not a lot. It must be cloudy. It might even be raining. Why do I care. I have nowhere to go. I am sipping herbal syrup and slowly coming back to life. I check my pulse rate. I have worsened over the months. I went to meet the gentleman who is no more here. In dreams, things go faster and you are back to yourself before anyone even notices. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM I hear my heartbeat. A result of eating bad shit and excessive drinking. I take a bite off a dried toast and listen to slow beats and sip tea. My heart quietens as if it has stopped.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • While the jazz plays.

    The buzzer is buzzing since an hour. For how long it will buzz, I do not know. Nobody cares to turn it off. Or that they are used to its irritating sound. I am not. I put on some jazz and wait for it to stop. Miles Davis. John Coltrane. It’s a blue world and what else colour will suit it. The trumpets play and then stop. Somebody turns off the buzzer. Thank God! I could pay that person, but I don’t know who it was and I do not care. Now things are quieter. It is like all the sickness suddenly left this place. Some murmuring outside the door. Some plates banging against each other. Hunger strikes at odd hours. Any hour is odd. I am reading James Joyce and he’s hilarious, like like Beckett. Both were Irish lunatics. I might be the next one, only un-Irish, but I can only hope for that. On my plate are three raisins remaining. For some reason, I am not eating them. They look infected but they are not. The really infected ones I have already eaten without much thought. My tooth aches. Maybe it’s the cold getting me. Maybe the early morning frigid shower, Maybe the beer. When you do not know, there’s scope of pointless thinking. The only noise now is of my own table fan. I never turn it off. Never. Once I died, and the fan was still running. And then it malfunctioned and I had to come back from being dead just to have it repaired. Now it is running fine and without any remorse. Some kid outside is doing its duty and shrieking for no reason. The speaker on my table stopped speaking at I don’t know what point. And now, its speaking suddenly has started me. I am startled and that’s what I am. I don’t know what to do. I pick up the speaker and inspect. Must be the loose wires. Must be. I push it inside the little hole in the speaker and it screams again. Scream all it can but I won’t be startled again. Coltrane is back with his sadness and the world is still blue. I walk to the other room and then come back to my chair. Everything appears quite clean. It must be somebody else’s home but it is mine and I could have sold it but I don’t own it. I look out the window and all is green and I am tired of it. Yellow must return. Or the deathly brown. Anything but green. The leaves can turn orange. The sky can turn maroon. The eggs have boiled somehow and now, they must be eaten. I cannot believe it. Eating boiled eggs. Or I could keep it for a week in fridge and then throw it out the window at somebody. I did that once. It was fun. The egg didn’t hit anybody. All I know is that it went out the window and then I ran inside like I was never there. Most probably, some pig ate it. So many stray pigs here. Last month one of them bit a kid or is that what I am imagining. Anyways, it must be painful. Even tearful. The kid must have screamed but not as much as my speaker. It’s a blue world and what else colour will suit it. Coltrane is dead and so is Joyce and what remains of them is consumed on weekends by rodents like me.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • Anyways.

    I had been away from here, and while I was away, I hoped nothing much would happen. Four hours have passed but the water hasn’t dried, not completely. The puddle has reduced from ten inches wide to four inches wide. In another couple of hours, I won’t be able to see my reflection in the ground. I read few pages of a regular story of a wonderland not any less damned than the heads of these people running this world. But I read it anyways. I ate anyways and drank a little. Now isn’t the time to lose my consciousness, and if I do, then this time too shall pass. It will anyways.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • Long ago you died, Mr Bergman.

    I watched you from the centre of my weary pupils. The dancing death. The men questioning what is what. The farce that is played out on the theatrical stage of a grand plague. The warrior’s prayer to Death to have some mercy upon him, and if not upon him then upon the others who he thinks deserve to live a little longer. But everybody’s time comes, and in your clever act it did come and with or with no love, men’s hearts were extinguished. The uneasiness, the fears all put to sleep. The darkness flew away and began another day. The kid lived. The cunning died without water, their legs thinner than wires, their spirits corrupted. They died while they were still damned. No salvation. I watched your genius and I thought, if this is not something worth watching, then what is. A world overflowing with man’s shit. You aren’t alive and I am glad you aren’t because now, it’s just all the good cinema getting murdered.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • Past sleep.

    A little rain makes the landscape greener. I look at the 20-feet tall pigeon sitting outside the glass window. It’s eyeball emerald studded watches brainlessly. Am I registered as an enemy? I wish a door was provided for an escape. But now I have to sit here under eternal watch. Its wings almost metallic. I walk to the window. It beats its paw on the glass, probably denying communication. I bite into an apple and sit in a chair. It’s raining again. The tree spread out their branches to absorb as much as they can. I finish eating and watch the pigeon. It is now looking away from me. Acknowledging the impossibility of an escape, I put my head down on top of the table and wait to run out of time. I wake up quite later. It’s still evening. A clock hangs but it faces the other side. I find myself in my chair with an empty plate on the table. I look towards the window. It’s clear. Nothing is sitting outside, nothing is watching me. It stopped raining but not long ago. I get up and walk to the window. I can climb out of the window but I do not. Were I to go out, where would I go? How long would I be gone before I am back here? Won’t it be easier to confront the reality of not leaving than to return to the same place? I move away from the window and sit in the chair. Maybe the pigeon will come back.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • Near a folded newspaper.

    somebody talks in the other room

    about what, I cannot say

    maybe some revolution

    I am turning colder

    my legs close to each other

    my hands folded

    I look up towards the source

    of all this untimely chill

    outside, a green river flows

    washing off man’s dirty footprints

    late noon, the chill fills my room

    I cannot sit in comfort

    for lack of choice, I have to.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • This isn’t Kafka.

    Somewhere around one third of finishing this book, I start losing my shit. My speed decreases. My mind is somewhere else. I hate to think. I stop before reading another page. I keep the book down. Were it Kafka, I could have bought cigarettes and smoked all night. But this isn’t Kafka and I cannot buy anyways. I am kind of stuck. The remaining two third needs to be completed as well. I am not interested in knowing how it ends. Books with endings I hate to read. I hate stories that try to make sense.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.