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GLASSWORKS
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Not Such Happy Days by Hibah Shabkhez

8/1/2023

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Here are the fuming chairs of a round table made rectangular by gilt-edged name-plates. Here is the world that promises sanctuary to strangers like me, that promises to live and die by the truth. Here are the words that arrest you, first when this world makes that promise and then when it breaks that promise. Here is a pen, announcing and denouncing things, until the fingers holding it are twisted in the darkness by shadows with muffled footfalls. The pen is your pen, the fingers are your fingers, but you cannot / will not / must not tell the story thus; so you say instead: here is the pen that ... The pen stops, hovers over a blot for one flicker of the guttering candle, then rises and moves away from the page. A massacre vanishes from history. ​

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Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Black Bough, Zin Daily, London Grip, The Madrigal, Acropolis Journal, Lucent Dreaming, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her. https://linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez

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    FLASH GLASS: A MONTHLY PUBLICATION OF FLASH FICTION, PROSE POETRY, & MICRO ESSAYS


    COVER IMAGE:
    ​"Fabric in the LIGHT #4" 
    Christopher Paul Brown
    ​ISSUE 25

    Categories

    All
    A Baptism
    Colin Bonini
    Crysta Garcia
    Danielle Shorr
    Fetal Pigs
    Flash Fiction
    Gracjan Anthony Kraszewski
    Hannah Rodabaugh
    Heat Advisory
    Hibah Shabkhez
    Historical Graffiti #4
    Holly Day
    If You're Like Me
    Janine DeBaise
    Jenn Powers
    Jillian Law
    Jim Ross
    Julie Holston
    Katee Fletcher
    Kathryn Reese
    Laurel S. Peterson
    Learning To Heal Ourselves
    Melissa Boberg
    Micro Essay
    Not Such Happy Days
    Plagiarism Pays
    Preservation
    Prose Poetry
    Right Now
    Roadside
    Run
    Sometimes
    Sorry For Ruining Everything
    Sunrise On The Farm
    The Principal And The Sea
    The Sister Of My Oldest Friend Dies From Lung Cancer
    When I Hold A Conch Shell To My Ear

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