Unquenchable Cashews

Varun was drenched in sweat that smelt of cattle shit. He awoke with a start and sighed at his recollection of this recurring nightmare he just escaped of. In a modern landscape, resembling his home town, he was flying a jetliner down the clumped streets of Dove Hills, and had a bird eye view of its apocalypse. He kept a low speed, conscious not to shear its wings off, as he flew beneath an overpass. His rekindled relief at seeing his hated houses go mortal were in no time replaced with remorse for pitiful sights of destroyed gardens, playschools, lanes, and graveyards. In his downward sympathy, he missed his handle at the engines, only to confront a skyscraper so high that he would have to rise vertically to clear it. He lifted the gear way up, pulling the plane into a disarmingly shallow climb, and, at the last moment, caught struck in the claw of its needle tower.

Moments before the impact, he chose between getting burned to flesh at coming explosion – raising a prayer for an instant transport to the other world, or jumping down at the stone cold, magnifying world eagerly waiting to tear his bones and marrow apart. He made the jump. Down he went, swirling in awful gravity that twisted his vision like a man high on love and psychedelics. Inches from bursting his skull, the distorted dream ate him up and purged him out back into an even more awful dimension - reality, reducing him into a pulp of quivering fear. Yet, stumbling into this infernal normality, he couldn't help but feel grateful to be back at his cosy apartment, lying near his semi-naked wife, collapsed in her evil sleep.

He sat up his bed – warm, tender and coffin like, and heard a small tickle in the bathroom, leaking off improperly closed tap lid. Incessant sounds of crickets, mating frogs and brooding mosquitos (usually traceless and transparent) rose as high in volume as a metallic quibble of foreign tongues. The ebb of resounding wires, the whirr of electric fridge and the flicker of faraway lights came into his awareness in high definition. He felt like coughing. The difference in temperature between his limbs inside blanket and torso out cold, compounded his temper and multiplied his frustration. He moved a little closer to Martha, coming into the area of her warmth, who moved in her sleep, away from him.

He walked off to the side window and looked down into the streets. There was a little wind – the air was filled with crisp aroma of a toothpaste – and felt deadly on his face. Dove Hills had always looked vacant of life but never like this. The sky gurgled darkness bereft of clouds and pale air drizzled with poisonous chill. Dim lights shone inside open windows of disoriented apartments that lined in scale-like precision across the broken curbs. Seen through window bars, they looked like aftermath of dead trees under forest fire, adamantly strong and unyielding to soil, reaching out for eternal stars, forgetting their twigs in soot.

Back when Varun and his wife arrived, Dove Hills used to dazzle with exaggerated beauty and induced meaning. It laid along the east coast of Bay of Bengal, while the west side bordered the plains with looming hills of discordant colours, their hums throbbing afar.

Varun used to work as a galleries after his time serving in Cargill for an art gallery. He made a living by obfuscating simple terms into unphathomable mazes and by steadily selling lies to people. It went well, owing to his good looks and dry voice. He cut a sculpture of Venus in his profile and an image of Rembrandt in portrait. He claimed his right cheek tri-dotted birthmark, a mark of bravery bequeathed from his past self as a pirate looting through oceans. He blatantly made use of this skill to cast funny spells on Martha, his wife, who gave in to his stupendous description of her stupid features. He married her before she could shake off this dizziness, and earned a vast sum of wealth for his feat as a deceiver of deserted widow.

Martha, married twice, had an unshakable disdain for higher ambitions, and her ignorance of financial necessity was complete. She had a bare neck and a diamond ring in her unpolished fingers. The only child in the family, she was bestowed with granted desires, unaffordable comforts, servile servants, deciding freedom, and loneliness. Her marriage helped her write an obituary to her past, and roam into the wilderness of an obscure liberation. She longed for a place to settle away from the promiscuities of her busy life, and spotted a land at the trotting suburb of Dove Hills.