The top selections in poetry, flash fiction and artwork for Day 6 of the Sehri Tales challenge; prompt: Relief

The voices–the wails that had called me here–were emanating from these very graves. 

How do you think I feel every time I find you hovering over the door to my classroom? Like when you’re the only passenger riding up a lift, and then it suddenly stops.

That was the first time in my life I’d smelled charred meat. I could tell it was different from the kind you’re supposed to eat, and my mother had to hold me as I threw up violently on the side of the street.

TRIGGER WARNING: Suicide, death, and gore.

Never in his wildest imaginations had Aniket thought that everything would come together so well. Nearly everyone he invited had come.

The whole courtroom held their breath, waiting to hear Nizam's answer. As he nodded in affirmation, the enraged audience got off their seats to beat up the accused.

Shimu and Tushar had grown up together on an alley in the Mirpur area of Dhaka city. Their neighbouring houses were separated only by a brick wall, about two meters high. The branches of a tree growing beside Tushar’s house overhung the wall, its foliage shading a part of Shimu’s courtyard.

I’m not sure when I first realised that we’d met before. In the beginning, you were just the elderly man I often noticed pottering around our communal rooftop.

The slamming of the front door sounded an ominous note, warning of trouble to come.

He had been practising saying his name out loud every night before going to sleep so that his ears remained accustomed to hearing his own name

The monsoons have passed. Moti has grown so healthy, so strong and so big that no other cocks even dare to be near him.

She walked, entranced, into the water until it reached her chin, the wing of her little pink butterfly stuck out like a shark fin.

Oh that angelic call, yet I cannot respond. I cannot open my mouth in fear of the burning pain overpowering my senses.

Talespeople presents The Screaming Shorts, partnered with Daily Star Books and Star Literature.

Ratan Da walked away, waddling the way he came from, whispering, “Don’t let it go to waste, don’t let it go to waste.”

A story of an ordinary man and his very ordinary journey.

An uncomfortable stillness emanated in the air around Rajpath road. I stood there with my suitcase in my hand, the hair on the back of my neck standing on edge. Glancing left then right, I crossed the road and entered the premises of Hotel Kaalipara.

It was another early sunset on a rainy day in Dhaka. Alamin was walking with a polythene bag of groceries back to his small, rented apartment.

Back at home, food used to narrate stories. Here, food does not travel far to the nooks and crannies of Velutha’s heart; it only reaches his stomach well enough to leave him looking healthy and strong.