dreamszilla

Globally, over 200 million women and girls have undergone Female Genital Mutilation. This story addresses this controversial issue, with the genders flipped because I wanted men in particular to squirm. Image generated with OpenAI Feda admired his father. Gurion was a woodworker and joiner of a skill unmatched this side of Ngoro. He could make a plank straight and level enough to satisfy the gods themselves - the elder women demanded it to show their dominion over nature - but he was happiest, as now, making peasant furniture that respected the grain of the wood. The backrest of the chair he was working on now was a single slice from the base of a red sapele tree, its concentric age lines drawing the eye hypnotically into its centre. Gurion had sheltered and smoked the piece for over a month to dry without cracking. In the humidity of the jungle, it was said, the driest things were Gurion's wood and Mother mRoto's humour. Gurion knelt, bracing the slice of wood ...

A time travelling historian falls in love with a woman who is struggling to get over the death of her boyfriend. Image generated with OpenAI I love you. Yes you. I know you think you don't know me, but you do. Or at least you did. We would sit on the roof of your house, watching the tree line, saying nothing, content in each other's company, and I'd hold your hand or run my fingers through your golden hair. You don't remember now, but you did. And I love you. And I am so sorry. You were dressed in black, your eyes dry, hands twitching. To someone else, your expression might have seemed cold, but I like to think I see more clearly than most. It's what I was trained to do. You had walked out halfway through the service and sat against the wall of the church. You remember this part. What you don't remember is the stranger, passing by on his way to class, pausing for just a moment, our eyes locking. I kept walking and didn't look back...

Pisquasistan Indian Charlie is called back from his exile in Canada to see off his dying father. Image generated with OpenAI Charlie's sister Agnus's letter said that their 87-year-old father, Walter Two Hearts, was bad sick and wanted him to come down from Canada to help him. Agnus, diabetic and wheelchair bound, could not - or at any rate would not - help Walter. As a born-again Christian she had no use for her dad or for Charlie whom she considered pagans. Charlie reread the letter and mulled over the contents. There was the matter of an outstanding federal warrant in the States. But he reckoned if the old man was asking for him, he was probably dying. He'd have to risk it. The family was Turtle Clan of the tiny Pisquasistan people of present-day northern Nevada. The Pisquasistan, a tiny breakaway faction of the Paiute people, had been desert people for centuries - who knows, maybe millennia - until World War II needed their ancestral lands as a gunnery ran...

Michail Mulvey's feckless character attends an interview to teach English at a religious school, but worries about his capacity for redemption. Once again I sat in the principal's office. But not for disciplinary reasons, at least not this time. This time I was interviewing for a job. And in a parochial school of all places. Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows High School. If Sister Constance, my elementary school principal, could see me now, surely she would see the irony and exclaim, "God does indeed work in mysterious ways." Mrs. Noonan, the school secretary - an abundant middle-aged woman with red hair and green eyes - sat behind a large gray desk piled high with manila folders and white forms, typing. "Sister Patricia should be here any minute now," she said, offering a reassuring smile. "She's in a meeting with Father Dolan." As I patiently waited - and tried to smooth out the coat hanger-inflicted wrinkles in my khakis - I noticed tha...

Meenal submits to the Maharishi's revenant ritual, and finds herself desiring nothing more than companionship. Image generated with OpenAI The final day of the initiation was everything that her sister had warned her about. Meenal was killed slowly. Her sister had missed giving her the finer details. But as she stood before the Maharishi, his thumbnail swatting the air around her purple-veined neck, Meenal felt it: her oxygen pipes getting snipped, and blood fountaining out. In those dying moments, Meenal couldn't keep the hatred out of her face for everything that had until now marked her as a person of this world. Her gold ring, her mobile phone, her Kanchivaram sari, Bata slippers. Before she glimpsed out one last time, the stage lights in the five-star hotel's boardroom flashed through her retinas. She heard a popping sound as if her neck had been snapped at the carotid artery. She remembered falling back, and a pair of gloved hands laying her down. No a...