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What (Not) To Do In The Event Of An Invasion

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Written For: FLAME University Upskill Workshop on “Everything you know about storytelling is wrong” taken by Assistant Professor- Academic Writing, Michael Burns.  Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/battle-black-blur-board-game-260024/ Dee really wasn’t paid enough for this. Honestly, she wasn’t even entirely sure what she was doing here in the President’s Situation Room during what seemed to be A Catastrophe of Epic Proportions if the red-faced Generals and intelligence agents were to be believed. Wait, did she even have the security clearance to be here when- “In case you were too slow to catch it the last five times, General Fa, the intelligence is infallible.” “That’s what you said last time Director and-” “We’ve already implemented measures after that, how long can you possibly hold a grudge?” “You weren’t the one with the combusted eyebrows, Markus.” “Gentlemen, I know you didn’t call us all here at three in the night to brief the President on your holid
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The Matchbox House

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Photo by  Jeffrey Czum  from  Pexels The Matchbox House  By Swadha Rawat   Struck a match Or in this case, well more than a few: A bubbling vat of oil, a hunk of smouldering charcoal and Another shovelful of hard, dark coal fuel. Covered your ears, breathed in the smoke: Wispy strands and dissipating tendrils caressing your hair.   Set a clock, and forgot, that it was ever there. A decade, two, three and four Then struck it with a baseball bat when the buzzing alarm wouldn’t stop. Eyes still closed, In a slowly warming up room: stifling, festering, irrevocably altering. The ice starts dripping down, pooling round the refrigerator But the taps run dry, coated with a fine layer of corrosive acid. (Entire biomes lost, entire species gone, entire livelihoods lost to the seemingly inevitable crawl of time.)   It was not inevitable, it could be stopped But still the man in the room lies, half asleep, deaf to his own wheezes, Resting upon a bed built from t
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The Reaper

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The Reaper   by Swadha Rawat Co -First Place Winning Piece at the 2019 Writer's Guild, Modern School Flash Writing Contest for Grade 10   Photo by Anete Lusina from Pexels   Even as the drums of war reverberated in the caged city,  A shroud of mourning muting the fallen kingdom, The Black Market glistened With precious swords and stolen stones The tinkle of golden bangles on slender wrists and golden coins trading hands. In the tangled web of crooked alleys Awaited a wizened old woman Whose eyes shone in the dark with the wisdom of a thousand suns. The newly crowned invaders swarmed the market Dark hands covered in blood reaching for even more After burning their lore and crushing their defeated souls. The Red Knight General of the conqueror’s force Swept into an alley in his bloodred cloak And looked down upon A crippled, wizen woman with a headband of beaten gold His gloved hand snatched the glittering circlet away. Her yellow teeth bared, the fo
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Modern Day Superheroes

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Modern Day Superheroes By Swadha Rawat   Photo by  Anna Shvets  from  Pexels Our generation Grew up watching Superman take flight over film reel And flipping the worn pages of Iron Man comics. Hearing cries of “Avengers Assemble” And dreaming of bat mobiles that rumbled through smoky streets. Recalling tales of super human legends: Of Hercules’s Labours that numbered twelve And Vishnu’s popular incarnations that ten times here dwelled. Today, though People are piled up in hospitals Coughing fits, and shivers, Ventilators, blankets and bodies clutter the halls. You and I, most likely, Are sequestered in our homes, hands slathered with sanitizer And watching the tally on our phones. On the frontlines, today, There dwell, modern day, real superheroes More alive than any of our books or movies or dusty tales of old. Helping others breath At the expense of their own. In the light bleached corridors and The creaking metal beds of the hospital floor, Beeping monitors and rapidly beating heart
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Narrating Nature

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Narrating Nature By Swadha Rawat    A Short Note on this Poem  5th June is World Environment Day and in this time of reckless consumerism, rampant pollution and strictly online activism, the question looming over us is : what will the environment and nature and all this biodiversity look like for our children? Will it still exist? I'm sixteen and for almost half my life, the go to thing I'd watch was Animal Planet or National Geographic. I grew up watching Bindi the Jungle Girl and on my tenth birthday, instead of celebrating it, I wanted to go to an animal sanctuary and see what tigers looked like out in the wild, not through a screen.  I could go to Ranthambore National Park and see nature but can the next generation, or the one after that? The Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that up to 150 species are lost everyday. Yes, even today. Even on World Environment Day. The reality is bleak. Our water is polluted, our air unbreathable, our forests are non existen
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Feminism Fact Check

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  Feminism Fact Check By Swadha Rawat Photo by Wallace Chuck via Pexels (Alternatively this can be read with hyperlinks to my sources at:  https://medium.com/@swadharawatwork/feminism-fact-check-39deda4bd6bd )  A while ago, one of my friends forwarded a video to me which was trending all over social media. To be completely honest, when I first watched it, I didn’t think it was that big a deal simply because people can’t possibly be that ignorant. Apparently, they are. That Instagram video which was created by Divyangna Trivedi now has 1.2 million views and there’s a follow up video too. People all over India went gaga about it, praising her for ‘exposing the truth of Feminism’. No. That is not what that video is about. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, it's called ‘I AM AGAINST TODAY’s feminism’. That is the actual title, and the views illustrated in it are more questionable than the above capitalisation structure. Now, Divyangna Trivedi is studying law. She says she’s a
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In Between Couch Cushions

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In Between Couch Cushions By Swadha Rawat   Photo taken by Lisa Fotios @ pexels.com A short note on how this poem came to be  I don’t think I've written on such a random topic before. The story behind this is that, quite simply put, I had writers block. I kept on sitting in front of my laptop for hours and hours but never made it past the first few lines of any project before deleting everything I'd written. Frustrated, I ended up googling "poem prompts" and looked for the silliest one I could find. The one that inspired this poem, as you may have guessed, was along the lines of 'you've lost something in the gap between your couch'. This poem is all about discovering things in the most unexpected places and not really realising you've lost something until it's found again. I think as a teenager, I feel myself changing so much over the years but often when someone's changing, they're discarding something and as I've tried to draw c
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