Shyama's Choice_Insurance against Loss_Ski Lesson_The Inherited Gothic House
Catalog Guide:
Shyama's Choice
The temperature on the phone registered 24 degrees Fahrenheit. Shyama looked at it without recognition and then typed, "What is 24 degrees Fahrenheit in Degree Celsius". As the number flashed on the screen, she put her hand on her mouth and let out an "aah". Then, slowly, she tiptoed towards the pearly white front door. She put her hand on the golden knob and turned it. Her bangles clinked as the door revealed a flurry of white powder. It was snowing. And Shyama was seeing it for the first time in her life.Shyama didn't belong here. She understood it when she boarded the flight from New Delhi ...
Insurance against Loss
In the innermost pocket of my backpack are an insulin pen and three Ativan tabs. They are my insurance policy. The insulin pen contains 300 units of lispro insulin, which would be fatal if injected all at once. But it would take at least 15 minutes to work, during which a person feels impending doom along with a host of other unpleasant sensations as their blood sugar drops. The Ativans, then, had to be taken first – to smooth the ride to oblivion. The insulin pen expires in 90 days. So that’s how long I have.Last night during dinner I told my husband that I was quitting my job. For once Brend...
Ski Lesson
She is walking along the corridor between the church and her room in the convent when she hears someone yell, “Run for cover motherfucker!” It’s not the command that alarms her—nothing so exciting ever happens to her—but rather the voice carrying those profane words: it is childlike. Sweet, even. She stops at a window, and keeping herself out of sight, peers carefully outside. Across the street, in the parking lot of the old parochial school, is a boy with his back to her. He crouches behind an improvised snowbank, his bare hands hurriedly packing snow into tight spheres. He has amassed a mea...
The Inherited Gothic House
When Grandma left me an old Victorian house, I looked up at it, and it resembled that of the Addams family's home. Its colors were gray and white with black shutters. It was early winter so trees stood, bare and forlorn. Cardinals and black birds landed on them, turning to chirp at me as if teasing me. Squirrels ran to climb up the bark, carrying food in their swollen cheeks. Something about the house caused goosebumps on my arms.People warned me that it was haunted but I didn't care. I arrived there, planning to convert it to a bed and breakfast hotel. But I met a ghost named Jeffery, the f...