Ayesha Malhotra Part 1 – Silence After the Flare The desert had always been quiet, but after the flare, silence was something else entirely. It pressed against the windows, settled on the roof tiles, thickened the air between words. Before, there had been the hum of ceiling fans, the tinny burst of radio jingles from the next-door grocer’s shop, the shriek of kids playing cricket on the dust-patched street. But the morning after the sky burned orange and green, none of that returned. The fans sat useless. The grocer closed his shutters. The cricket bat lay abandoned in the sand.…