Short Story: Sponge-grass by Mehreen Ahmed

In this short story, Mehreen Ahmed captures the complicated side of love, desire, and emotions in today’s times when the virtual world is more real than the real world.

I stood on a patch of grass in the wetlands. I called it the sponge-grass. If one were to step on it, the sponge-grass patch, typically, sprung up and down under one’s feet movement, not submerge completely. This porous patch of the drenched grass, as resilient as it was held up some promise of stability, but not a whole lot.

Standing on it, I also watched birds through handheld binoculars at a distance. Today, I watched something spectacular—the rare ospreys. I almost thought they had disappeared from this part of the globe—the wetlands. Almost, they never flew in here at all. But here they were, today, alive and well.