Aaratrika Roy The evening the horizon cracked, the sea smelled like rusted coins and wet moss, and the sky wore the color of old bruises, and I stood on the seawall gripping my father’s compass like it might point me toward a version of myself that wasn’t stuck between everybody’s pity and my own silence; gulls shrieked overhead, kids played cricket on the sand with a plastic bat that had lost its stickers years ago, Naina texted three times to ask if I was still “brooding like a Victorian ghost” and I didn’t answer because the word brooding felt exactly…
