Life stagnates as people start trickling back to their houses. Some look forward to the expectant faces of their children, while some others dread their churlish wives. As they saunter along doggedly, the day’s events play like a broken record in their heads – a mimicry of sanity. A crow caws somewhere as though lovesick. Streetlights come on and fireflies hover in a daze. Bicycles, cricket bats, and skipping ropes are lugged back home by children who are repeatedly beckoned by overbearing mothers. Almost in a trance, the buzz of the day fades away as a feigned tranquility descends.

molten skyline…
an earthworm buries
itself deeper

—
Shloka Shankar is a freelance writer residing in India. Her work appears in over two dozen international anthologies including publications by Paragram, Silver Birch Press, Minor Arcana Press, Harbinger Asylum, Kind of a Hurricane Press and Writing Knights Press among others. Her poems, erasures, haiku & tanka have appeared in numerous print and online journals. She is also the editor of the literary and arts journal, Sonic Boom.