Stan Scribbles

~ Julia Have you ever stopped to notice how things really only last for a little while? And when something comes to an end, it happens abruptly; silently, with no signs of it happening at all. Just the other day, I was driving past one of my favourite restaurants, just to see the place had closed down and been replaced by another. Granted I had only been there a few times for special occasions and it had been long since I had gone last, but it still filled me with a huge sense of disappointment. When I had dined there a couple months ago, would I have held the experience in a different light had I known then that it would be my last time having their cheesecake for dessert? This leads me to another memory from my last few months of high school. It was before we started preparing for our Board exams in earnest, when we still had classes happening instead of just revision periods. One of my classmates made a witty joke in English period, and it had the whole class clutching their bellies...

  ~ Kook kannan Winning entry of PRADHARSHINI '24, Flash Fiction Prompt: You get the ability to speak with the dead after touching an ancient book. But you can do so for only one minute. Word limit: 180 SandwichMan: Speaking with the dead was never my hobby until I touched that book. And the first person I talked to was a thousand-year-old mummy buried beside it. But that's how learnt the rules for this power. One, I had to touch the dead in order to speak with them - which is not an easy feat. Two, I can speak with them only for one minute. Three, never again. Somehow, that mummy wasted the whole minute just to explain these three rules to me. I had talked to many dead bodies ever since then and learnt a lot more nuances about it. But the most shocking one was what I learnt yesterday - it was not just my hands that wielded the power. I went to the nearest 'SandwichMan' joint yesterday with my friends for a dinner party. And as soon as the allegedly chicken sandw...