In his penthouse, the father leans on his Lay-Z-Boy recliner, grunting his approval at The Economist. The monsoon rain patters against the windows; its steady rhythm washes away every distraction until even the stock charts seem to sharpen. In the adjacent room, his wife twists on her yoga mat. “Steady,” her Pilates instructor says through the iPad. She shuts her eyes and imagines she’s a tree standing upright against the gusts outside. She lifts her chin and smiles. Downstairs, his daughter plays Tum Se Hi on her AirPods. She spins barefoot across the sleek tiled floor, an invisible lover holding on to her, the monsoon cascading over them like a blessing.
In the slums half a kilometer away, the family’s fruit-seller wades through waist-deep floodwater reeking of sewage. He scoops up his two-year old grandson from a cot, wraps him in a tattered shawl, and holds him high. Outside, his wife steadies a bucket on her head—roti sealed in plastic, a dented cooking pot, a tin box of spare cash. Her body trembles and goosebumps stipple her chilled skin. “The children are already higher up,” she says, her voice quivering. Together, they push against the current, their limbs aching, their grandson’s cries carrying over the rain, until they reach higher ground, where they reunite with six of their seven children.
Still, the rain keeps falling—polishing glass towers, turning alleys into streams. Eighteen hours later, when the sun returns and the water retreats, the fruit-seller and his sons will dig through debris until their palms blister, searching for the one buried when the mud-brick workshop collapsed.
Vikesh Mirchandani is a writer from Jakarta, Indonesia. His work has appeared in Porch Literary Magazine, Flash Phantoms, and FlashFlood Journal, and is forthcoming in the Edinburgh Anthology 2026. He won third place in the Anthology Flash Fiction Competition 2025 and has been longlisted for prizes by Flash 500 and Cranked Anvil Press. His published works can be found at vikeshmirchandani.com.
Modern Flash Fiction 