Upoma Aziz

Food's a love language. People who don't cook are missing out.

“Are you still there?” I ask. “I’m here,” I hear a voice that’s my own.

I was not Hephaestus, Hephaestus was not I.

“Ugh, rotten stains… Won’t budge…”

He sleeps on his side, on his right side, to be specific. On the nights the excruciating pain on his right shoulder numbs him, he

The creatures of the dark feed on fear. And hot sauce.

“What’s the largest sum of money you’ve seen at a time?”

All the upsetting news we received, we learned to toss with the stones that skipped seven times across the water before sinking into oblivion.

A crestfallen soldier at the end of his service, the spine of the book was not vertical. It had contorted and bent at strange angles; if this were a person everyone would look at him with rueful, pitying eyes. Pitying eyes are curious, sneering eyes, prying eyes. Pitying eyes are not kind eyes.

Do we measure the leaves first? Or do we pour the water?

Webtoon is an app that lets you select from a myriad of web comics for free, unless you want to read an episode early.

I do not miss going to work, but I miss being young – not like the leftover puzzle pieces from several different sets jammed into one, never quite fitting.

"You know," I said, opening my backpack. "Maybe I will work from here today, listen to your story and write something on it."

As a child, every afternoon my playdates and I would go up to the roof of the tallest building in the community and stare at the clouds and make up a new story each day.

Every time I look at you, I am reminded how moot a promise forever is.

“You know, he never really stopped loving you.”

The ruby red kite fluttered above head, contrasted against the aquamarine sky, and it all was picture perfect for a split second, so perfect that it was a spoiler to the fact that something horrible was about to follow, like it did almost always.

Ta was our neighbour, but by no means was she the ‘girl next door’. She had never showed up on our doorstep cradling an ice-cream box full of pakoras her mom made, perhaps in the very same box I had delivered to their home a week earlier.

Salima didn’t realise that she had fallen asleep.

Her hair was perfect. Like, so perfect that if she would have to sell it to buy him a present, she would have a lot more than just twenty