Bottles of Moonshine – A short story’s story

I have a new short story up on Medium.

It’s called Bottles of Moonshine, and you can read it here.

It’s the first of a new series of stories I’m going to write over at Medium, just to see what the platform can offer. I’m not ditching WordPress; this is where I first started writing, and I hope to complement both of them in some way. Perhaps I could actually use this blog more as an actual blog than as the place where I put out my finished work. I could think here. Maybe. But wherever this leads, I’ll keep you posted.

As for this story, I first came up with a draft of this after a visit to a village called Pavumba in the Kayamkulam district of Kerala, where a close friend’s family is from. Most of these characters are real, as flesh and bone as you and I are, but their actions are wholly imaginary. The biggest struggle I had with this story was how to end it. I needed an emotional attachment, something that wanted to keep Manikuttan here, and I wanted to nest that in a setting of loneliness and nostalgia. Kerala is famous for sending its sons and daughters abroad, but I wanted to explore what the sons felt when the time came for them to go. It’s a deeply felt story, as much about the place in which it is set as it is about the people that inhabit it.

I hope you like it, and do comment, here or on there. Your words are the solitary writer’s only encouragement.