Tag: spirituality

  • Tiger Caves and Temple Monkeys

    Tiger Caves and Temple Monkeys

    Previously published in The Best Asian Short Stories (2021), Kitaab, Singapore. The hills are dipped in pastel shades of gold and indigo. The wind surrounds me in playful whistles, beating my clothes in sudden outbursts and drying off the sweat on my neck. Joint-aches had troubled me a bit when I climbed up this rock,…

  • Late Summer

    Late Summer

        Saxton jammed the butt of his rifle into his shoulder and aimed it at the flash of movement. He kept the front sight trained on a slim form as it moved down the steep slope of a hill his pa, long dead from typhoid, had nicknamed Baldy Knob. His higher position on an…

  • Labor of Love

    Labor of Love

        Thomas heard the knock on the door right as he was sitting down with a cold beer for a break. He was both annoyed at the sound of the knock and felt a sense of guilt since he had no real excuse to leave the door unanswered. He let out a sigh as…

  • Railing harrow grid

    Railing harrow grid

    And I want to cage myself As a Father whose enclosure has fortified his dreams within this great church of wills And prays   And I want to cage myself As a morning bird whose singing enjoys its very own sound Screaming all the happiness the day along aims to deserve And stretches   And…

  • child psychics

    child psychics

    The kind of prophecies children give are more about showmanship than the world to come   to enlarge my pupils the way another hand shrank and growled under mine I used to think the things I did to people in my grasp were magic   but everyone can hit a muscle like this one and…

  • BOB OVER ON 2ND STREET USED TO BE A PASTOR

    BOB OVER ON 2ND STREET USED TO BE A PASTOR

    I parroted the company line until one Sunday I finally told them the truth about me. My experience of the Divine Christ. I’d been in such darkness. Unimaginable in its gravity. Advisors encouraged me to pray and embrace the answer when it came, so I kept praying but got nothing. Nothing. Finally, I prayed, I’ll…

  • Prufrock’s Peach

    Prufrock’s Peach

    Recently I read a book in which a pastor asks her congregants their #1 most frequent thoughts about themselves. People wrote these thoughts on sticky notes and posted them to a giant board inside the church. Thoughts like, “I am not enough,” and “I won’t be okay until I lose weight.”  If we’re honest, as…

  • The Testament of Algorithms

    The Testament of Algorithms

      It had been a long year – not a good year, but a long one.  When it was finally over, when the last bottle of cheap wine was upturned in the ice bucket, when the last guest left, leaving a wreck of their small apartment, Glen and Glenda turned to each other.  The question…

  • Yellowjacket Kid

    Yellowjacket Kid

      We went around the cabin and each kid had to say something about himself. Uttie, our counselor, talked about the camp and meals and bedtime and everything. He had to answer a lot of questions because, even though our parents had only just left, already a kid had got hurt in a really awful…

  • Theo-Poetics – A Theory of the Divine

    Theo-Poetics – A Theory of the Divine

    “Words are flying out like Endless rain into a paper cupThey slither while they passThey slip away across the universePools of sorrow waves of joyare drifting through my open mindPossessing and caressing me.” The Beatles   Poetry is that song that lingers in our mind, that earworm that bores into your mundane thoughts. It is…

  • Naked Vicar

    Naked Vicar

    Ruth, Epiphany (Sunday, 6th January) She looked contemptuously at the portrait she had just finished; Mr E. A. Adonis had been dismissive and rude when she had gone to his house to take preliminary photographs for the painting and had then made several attempts to pat her bottom, and the finished portrait clearly showed her…

  • The Will

    The Will

    “Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death, And again death, death, death, death . . .” –       Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking Have heard sermons in the shape of waiting. Have wondered if God meant everything created as if creating always has a purpose. Have seen change in passing /witnessed…