6. Story Sunday #5
Bonus issue: Read excerpts from Summer Melody, Pomegranate Summer, and Ruby Whispers
Dear reader,
This is not how I envisioned typing out this first issue of the new year—down with a viral, fun times—and so the first ‘proper’ issue of the year will be out next Sunday, January 19, at the usual time. Today, you’re getting a sort of bonus issue instead, one of a few I always have saved in my drafts for rainy days such as these.
For your Sunday reading pleasure (or for any day that you’ll open this), here are excerpts from three of my published works.
Those of you who have already read and/or own these stories, hope you enjoy revisiting them! For others who have these stories but haven’t had a chance to get around to them, hope this can be that little nudge you need to pick them up 😉 Needless to say, if you have read and enjoyed any of my work (or, especially, any indie work, for that matter), please take out a few minutes of your time to leave a public-facing review. It helps a great deal in expanding the audience who is shown these stories in their online algorithms!
Without further ado, in order of newest to earliest publication dates.
Ruby Whispers
a standalone fantasy flash fiction that was published on KDP in October 2023
John Noble was already awake when greeted by the mango-tinted sun. He padded to the kitchen, briefly levitating over the half-full, almost-full boxes in his path; the completed ones were snug in the corners he had placed them in a few weeks ago. He reached in the cupboard for two mugs before picking up just his, fingers itching, ghosting.
The kettle was filled the night before, as always, and he placed his hands along its curved middle, closed his eyes like he was praying—condensed swishes, hisses, bubbles before the tinny whistle pierced the quiet morning of their Salem suburb. A splish of milk, half a sugar, steamy, earthy tones.
Five minutes later, John stood on the porch, a steaming mug misting the crisp view. Everywhere already smelled of smoke and apples, cinnamon and pumpkin.
It was going to be a beautiful day.
Buy links (this is a digital exclusive): India | US | UK
Pomegranate Summer
a micro-collection of three travel-related creative non-fiction set in Spain: the first two from when I lived there for 9 months between 2014-2015, and the third during a May 2018 trip to visit friends
Rafael of Plaça Reial
I walk past muted pastel red, green, and violet, the gilded Opera house; past intricate carvings, pillars, the delicatelycraftedbutsolid wrought-iron balconies of the Las Ramblas. This hour, this early glow already feels like a scrap left behind by wistful daydreams. Half-open shutters and a reverse tilt shift—a city, its people rising in focus. The wind blows me towards the harbour. Plaça Reial where the light slants and the ocean air from the salty marina pools on the cobblestones, where everything mingles with the palm trees, the fountain, the cafes in this square; looping, swirling, aimless wandering.
In Search of the Shadow of the Wind
Walk a bit further along Rambla de Santa Monica towards Calle Arco del Teatro and step through its arch. You will find yourself in a narrow alley. Even on a sunny high summer’s day, these intricate, narrow streets that form so much of Barcelona’s old city are cooler, quieter, in shadow. On the day I find myself walking down the Ramblas in search of the red ICONO Serveis umbrella, it is a leaden, cloudy sky that watches over me, one like many others I’ve known during my university days in England, but not one you’d expect in Spain. There is a light drizzle by the time I come closer to the Santa Monica Arts Centre and I wonder again whether I should have just rescheduled like I was planning to until a few hours ago.
What am I doing here in the more of a scar than a street of the Arco del Teatro on a spring evening with a South African, a Spaniard, an Australian couple, and some Norwegians? There is colourful graffiti on the walls—the yellow and red of the Catalan flag, the greens, blues and pinks of a rather inquisitive dragon—but the place we are searching for is subtler. It would be tucked away in a corner, the sort of doorway that most walk by without more than a glance, if that. A large door of carved wood, blackened by time and humidity. Is it there next to the shop with chipped forest-green shutters? Or might it be behind the rusted ladder that leads to a first-floor building?
In reality, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books will find us only when we slip back into the pages of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind. Set in a 1940s Barcelona still reeling from the Civil War, this gothic tale makes ample use of its setting, and has triggered walking tours to trace the footsteps of characters hard to forget, in a city almost impossible to shake.
Pomegranate Summer
Your first glimpse of the Sierra Nevada will forever be tangled with the everlasting feeling of flat landscapes and Ed Sheeran’s ‘Perfect’. It is the only English song on the radio in your two odd hours on the road and chooses to come on just as the mountains appear over the bend, towering, shrouded in clouds. The song ends; a ray of sunshine to your left.
A few days later, you’re standing across from one of those peaks, perched high up somewhere in the grounds of the Alhambra. It is a grey, misty, muggy day and you’re about to head down for lunch before making the trek back up to the palace. Your friend knows a local place that serves some of the best Jamon de Trevelez, ham from the local Alpujarras villages.
You step into a seemingly nondescript alley. There is a tapas bar at the far corner: bright colours, light, people, food. You stand at a tall table with glasses of a local wine that you make a mental note to remember for later, at night when you record your day (you will forget by then but hug the memory to your chest as you fall asleep). Like in any foreign city with a language other than English, you, or rather your ears, always sift through the words and sounds around you, while simultaneously enjoying the feel of new languages, increasingly familiar languages and accents. The food arrives—blood sausage with caramelised onions, a variety of croquettes, a popular Granada salad. You sprinkle on everything the sauce with no name.
Buy links: US (print) | US (ebook) | UK (print) | UK (ebook) | India (ebook)
I still have a few print author copies available with me for those in India. Happy to sign and mail them to you, just get in touch about pricing and shipping!
Summer Melody
my debut novelette about music, family, love, friendship, and hope published in November 2022 by Arizona-based Alien Buddha Press
It was still dark when Sophie started playing the Vivaldi. She kept her eyes closed, bow flying through Mendelssohn and Haydn, submerging her worries, each note taking turns at holding them down before tossing to the one after. The morning grew warmer amidst the first strains of Bach. Sophie played on until the faint sound of his cello started up somewhere out there in the drifts of her mind; she almost leaned into it by habit before jerking open her eyes, her bow stilled.
The living space in her tiny London studio overlooked a school, the low buildings unimaginatively placed in the middle of a standard-issue space. At Trinity, her room had overlooked a stone fountain in a small park that was mostly empty but for the old man who came every day and sat on the bench for an hour, no matter the weather. He would read his paper, sometimes a book, eat a snack, or just sit there facing the cracked, empty bowl of the fountain.
Sophie sighed and stood up, packing everything away. Her phone vibrated underneath her violin case.
Are you still coming to dinner tonight? Mum x
Despite telling April that she would know it was her, Sophie’s mother insisted on signing off on all her texts. Today, she found it endearing, before remembering she still hadn’t told her parents about the concert; posters had already started appearing at the usual places and it was only a matter of time before they found out. She hadn’t even told Robby yet, though her best friend had been back from Vienna for more than a week now. But it felt selfish to want him all to herself when his mother needed him more. Sophie headed to the kitchen to put the kettle on, careful to avoid the invitation crammed under a pile of junk mail on the narrow table in the hallway. But the carefully worded note in Paul’s loopy handwriting followed her, just a couple of steps behind.
Sophie first met Paul Clark on the day she turned nineteen, late in her first semester at Trinity. It was a week after the college’s winter concert, where he had performed Bach’s ‘Cello Suite in G Major’ better than several professionals she’d heard. Here was a 21 year old going places, and sure enough, their director had made a special announcement that Paul was moving to Philadelphia after securing a coveted place on the exceedingly competitive Curtis Post- Baccalaureate Diploma programme. Sophie had felt a twinge she recognised as jealousy. An irrational jealousy that she wasn’t a part of his life, he who played music that tunneled into the spaces underneath her doubts and rendered them insignificant.
But here he was bumping into her at a local coffee place many Trinity students liked to frequent. He was standing right behind her in the line when she spun around to see if any of her friends were there; she hated sitting alone. As she turned, she brushed against him, knocking a folder out of his hand. A few loose pages fluttered out. Sophie instinctively bent down and gathered the ones within reach; looking up at him only once she had stood back up and handed them over to him.
Those grey-blue eyes were intense, but friendly. He looked so serious, so put together, so damn sure of his place in the world. Even at the concert, she’d wondered how he was only two years older than her. But then he started playing and all else was forgotten.
“Your performance at the winter concert was my favourite of the night.”
Sophie cringed inwardly. She was still waiting for her change, half-turned towards him. But the next moment, she was rewarded with a shy smile that was endearing in its contrast to the absolute confidence of his playing.
“That’s very kind. Thank you.”
“Your father was in the Rizzoni Quartet, wasn’t he?”
Paul had already put his hand in his pocket for his wallet, in anticipation of being next in line. He looked up at Sophie’s question and something like surprise passed across his face. She looked at her feet. Why had she asked a question she knew the answer to? Damn her need to keep this conversation going. Sophie was about to swivel back around to see where the barista was when Paul spoke again. This time, there was something in the tone that made her glance up and hold his gaze.
“I wouldn’t have thought that many people from our generation would know who they were...who he was.”
“My mother used to play their music on the days my father was out of town on one of his conferences. She didn’t say it out loud, but I think they made her tolerate the long hours I made her play with me and my dolls.”
This was far from the poised conversations she’d staged in her mind since the concert. But it drew a real smile from him, one that Sophie hadn’t dared to hope for, even in her daydreams. It was just the beginning.
Now, on the Tube to her parents’, Sophie nudged all unwanted Paul thoughts under her seat, placing her palms flat on her knees, as if that would keep everything in place. She snuck a look around the busy carriage to see if anyone had noticed. Just then, they pulled into the next stop and the person standing across from her got off, exposing a small square of the window. With her slight frame, brown hair flecked with dark gold, oval face and wide-set brown eyes, Sophie looked like neither of her parents. As a kid, she took it personally, looking nothing like her mother. In her rebel teenage years, it was as a matter of pride, a badge of her uniqueness. Now in her twenties, Sophie was undecided. Call it a sort of uneasy truce. She swallowed the tears suddenly built up in her throat as the train slowed down at Raynes Park and she got off.
Buy links: US (print) | UK (print) | India (ebook)
I’m hopeful of making a print version available in India in 2025, stay tuned!
From the archives
The first issue from 2024 which, once you scroll to here, has an old essay of mine about the 2017 Jaipur Literary Festival, Virginia Woolf, hope, and the nature of words and writing.
Hope you found something you liked, and that it’ll make you want to pick up the full thing 😊
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Take care and I’ll see you on January 19!
Anu
You can find me on Bluesky at @anushreenande (yep I finally created an account and I’m really enjoying it—my Twitter remains online so far but I’m not actively posting on there anymore) and on Instagram at @anushreenande. You can support my work at https://buymeacoffee.com/anushreenande.
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