Very small stories about people doing slightly strange things. no morals, mostly. Each one a few hundred words, printable on a single sheet, designed to be read at the dinner table or in an auto.
“A man cannot stop adding things to a shopping cart he will never check out. The site begins to add things back when he removes them. The site has theories about him. He has theories about the site. Only one of them is right.”
He had been borrowing them for nineteen years, and he was not finished with any of them. The librarian was the third generation in her job. She, also, was not finished.
First the word, then the object. Then, over a long, slow year, the shape of the morning that the kettle used to make. Her grandson begins to learn the shape, in reverse.
For three weeks in November, the same auto-rickshaw was parked outside Brigade Road, meter running, driver pleasant, refusing every single rider with a small, courteous shake of the head.
It was polite, at first. It had observations. It would not say where it had been before it arrived in the box, and she was too embarrassed, in front of a phone, to ask.
She did not read it. She did not, for the longest time, even consider reading it. Then she did consider it. The not-reading became its own kind of weight.
He counted them every morning, on his way to school, for eleven years. When he stopped, three of them noticed. The other thirty-one did not.