Maya Fernandes Liam liked mornings best when the park was still quiet, when the only sound was the distant bark of a dog or the shuffle of leaves under shoes that weren’t his own, when he could walk past the fountain and not feel the weight of other people’s eyes on him. The bench near the fountain was old, its paint chipped in places, its iron arms cold in autumn, but it was his grandmother’s bench, or at least he thought of it that way, because she had sat there with him for years, tossing breadcrumbs at the pigeons that…
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Elena Roy Episode 1 – The First Glance The rain had come down hard in the afternoon and left Park Street glistening like a polished mirror under the late sun. Rhea walked quickly, her sandals tapping against the damp pavement, the faint scent of wet earth and fried snacks from roadside stalls curling into the air. She had not planned to stop anywhere, but as she passed the corner café with its green awning dripping with raindrops, she slowed. She had been there a handful of times in her college years, when life was simpler and her evenings less scripted…
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Kyra D’Souza Part 1 – The Rooftop Silence The city never really sleeps, but there are these odd hours when even the traffic feels like it’s breathing slow. Three in the morning, maybe four. You don’t check the clock because if you do, you’ll be reminded that life is running faster than you are, and you’re not ready to feel guilty again. So you let time blur, let the empty streets below hum like background music. On the rooftop of an old building where the paint has peeled into random maps, I sit with my knees pulled up, cigarette unlit…
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Neha Banerjee The Rooftop That Wasn’t There Aarav didn’t mean to miss the last train. It just happened, like most of his mistakes—small, accidental, and irreversible. One late night line of code at work turned into another, and another, until he looked up at the time glowing on his cracked phone screen and realized the metro gates would already be shuttering. He left the office anyway, stepping out into a city that was still awake but somehow lonelier for it, the neon lights buzzing like a swarm of mechanical fireflies. The streets of New Delhi after midnight weren’t empty; they…