Jared and the dog stared each other down. Between them, the glass door was smeared with paw prints. Jared held his surgical mask in his hand. The dog couldn’t hear him over the howling and barking from back inside the building. Go away, mouthed Jared at the dog. The dog barked at him. No, mouthed Jared, shaking his head. The dog ran up to the door and pawed it again. Jared looked over his back, into the building. The front desk was behind him, the wood paneling stripped completely. A computer sat dead on the desk. Every scrap of paper,…

The bubbles in my bath are white; try as I might they never change despite a range of gels and goos in rainbow hues – pinks, greens and blues. The chemists say it’s child’s play to reproduce the scent of fruits, herbs, flowers and roots. But still the foam is monochrome.

Cryonics, the technique of freezing dead rich people and their pets, is generally disregarded as a big lame waste of money by most scientists and doctors. The goal of cryonics is to preserve all cells in the body well enough such that in the distant future, after scientists have figured out how to successfully “thaw” these high-stakes ice cubes, doctors [robots? Femto-sized germ soldiers?] could take a stab at curing your previously lethal disease. Then you would be free to marvel at the brushed stainless steel landscape, the crushing loneliness, and how everyone has a cell phone in their brain…

In the island park of Nirvana Nagar, a giant statue of the Blessed with its head in the clouds — against a golden orb, nimbused by an ethereal radiance. ‘The Buddha is Smiling’ was the codeword for the first underground nuclear tests conducted by India at the army range of Pokhran in the Thar desert. The ‘Smiling Buddha’ was a high explosive implosion system weighing 1400 kg with a reported yield of 20 kilotons. The date was May 18, 1974: Buddha Purnima, the day when Siddhartha Gautama was born 2530 years ago. On the forehead, dew drops condense into diamonds…

If you wish to make the color blue take a piece of sky and put it in a pot large enough to place on the flame of the horizon …And I left the recipe for whoever, one day, would imitate the sky. — Nuno Júdice Translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith River kites, with sun-smeared wings climb towers of spiral stairs with currents paying out their cords from the choppy waves at the harbor. White wings dazzle, helicoid against a cerulean mystery — witnesses to a mythopoeic voyage unlocking the color schemes of nature. After the rain, the sun…