I faked everything. School was easy, my parents never checked The rest was harder, it wasn’t easy to pretend I was the best in my gymnastics class when I had never touched a baton. I acted sick for a while, to excuse my sudden failures. My parents worried, my father wanted to take me to a specialist, my mother stayed […]
‘Where’s Abel?’ my father asks. I’ve changed into his dead daughter’s clothes, dressed her carefully as if she were a porcelain doll, I have been wearing her face for my whole life, and yet he can tell us apart. ‘I’m Abel, dad.’ I respond. ‘Oh.’ That’s all he says. No questions about where I am. He doesn’t care, the thought […]
We live in the countryside, on the outskirts of a small town, surrounded by miles of fields and aspen trees. We supply the town’s market with our produce. Surprisingly, I’m in charge of taking care of the plants, the one thing I’m actually good at, not that I’m better than Abel, but farming and gardening would get in the way […]
I’ve laid in bed a hundred nights and whispered a thousand names to myself, eyes closed and hands clasped together for warmth beneath my pillow. Waves far off into the distance dance, and I trace the same pattern with imaginative hands from my thumb up to my collarbone. When will it get to a thousand and one names? Or will […]
The main theme in ‘Monsieur Lazhar’, a film directed by Philippe Falardeau, is death. This film is a dramatic comedy that takes place in a primary school in Canada where a teacher has committed suicide, and is then replaced by ‘Monsieur Bachir Lazhar’, an Algerian immigrant seeking asylum, after having left his home country due to threats to his family, […]
‘Items that have gone missing inside the Lucy Temerlin institute for broken shapeshifters containment room’ is a short story written by Kuzhali Manickavel in June 2021. The best way to describe Manickavel’s story is to claim that it is almost kaleidoscopic: every time it is read, a new interpretation can be construed. This review will include overall analyses to try […]
Focusing on ‘To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth’. Wheatley was commissioned to write the eulogy ‘To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth’ in 1773, in honour of his recent appointment. Wheatley’s poems tend to discuss freedom, imagination, and her origins. For example: ‘on Being Brought from Africa to America’ and ‘On Imagination’. Yet, the main theme of […]
Part Two. ‘You didn’t kill her, you were too late, but not by your own fault. Truth is, Lyre has been dead from the beginning. But there is still a way to save her, to bring her back, if you’re interested.’ A being greeted me when I turned around, not human, but not a spirit either, with eyes as dark […]
Part one Arista, a flower native to Briar, with cornflower blue petals during the day, that transformed into a vivid shade of Persian pink as the sun set. They only bloomed here, herbologists all over the world had tried growing them in other nations, but to no avail. They were so rare in fact, that they only grew in one […]
Prologue She never woke up. Briar, a nation of wilderness with fields of linseed blossoms dotted with mauve petals, where legends lived and bloomed from the branches of pomegranate trees. Creatures from every ocean, sky, and land came to Briar, in hope of making some extraordinary discovery. Shadows whispered that even standing near its borders could grant you your wildest […]