Poetry 2014 Shortlist, Sayantini Bhattacharya

Death of a Soul

She lies in beauty,
She contemplates the stars,
Murmuring the hymns of life.
She contemplates herself in the water,
Stale and still,
No movement.
She spits on the image,
She now abhors her,
A scorned woman.
...
She thinks of the demons, that
Touched her everywhere,
Demeaned, defamed and threw her on the ground.
She rose up, hollow within,
Mere a mass of flesh and bone,
Dragged her legs all around,
And, came out.
...
She sits beside the small tarn,
And, tries to regain her lost image,
She stirs the water persistently.
But nothing turns up.
She knows she has lost everything,
Her respect, her self-esteem,
But she lives in a mere body,
Death of a pure soul.

Flash Fiction 2014 Shortlist, Sayantini Bhattacharya

Webbed

Finally the day came for which Dhruv had been waiting from last few years. Dhruv and Shalini met in a chat room, they talked for long, smiled together, shared emotional memories and promised to love each other till the very end. Finally when the proposal came from Shalini to have a meeting in her place, Dhruv just couldn’t stop himself from jumping like a kid. As he reached Shalini’s door dressed perfectly and with a bunch of red roses, he could feel his heartbeats when he touched the calling bell. Shalini was looking extra-ordinarily sexy in the black gown, but what shook Dhruv entirely were her six bony, hairy hands, two similarly bony legs, a plump torso and a large cobweb on which she posed herself.