"The Last Conversation"

By Ayan Chakraborty

It takes an hour and a half to reach the little kid.

The one who adulted into a comic sense of escape.

Picking up little battles under the yellow and honey house where his father had spent a life.

And his mother an age in it.

They spoke too loud.

Of dreams and gardens, about thick glass windows and strong smelling paint.

But there was so much red around them that they didn't notice.

And in time, yellow dahlias got the axe and grew green into denser, unpruned savagery.

The stones were too cold even during spring time.

Slowly, they moved out. The child over-grown, his parents tired.

There's an ocean that drew breathe in between.

The intoxication of twenty years.

The dulcet tune of an unending, weird, beautiful theatre.

He hates much yet most of it, he had loved.

The young man tries to reach out to the child for one last conversation.

Through worn out beds, broken tiles and fallen plasters.

It would be his final escape. Once and for all.

One last conversation that would elude an eternity.

His watch stops.

He realizes it would cost a life in a minute.

By Ayan Chakraborty