Faraz Parvez

  🖋️“5 Vignettes That Will Stay With You” By Faraz Parvez Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal Retired Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA (Pseudonym of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal) 1. The Mirror That Told the Truth Every morning, the man shaved in front of the same mirror. But one day, the mirror whispered, “You lie more than you live.” Startled, he laughed it off, calling it a hallucination. But the next day, the mirror showed him— not his face , but all the masks he had worn over the years. The kind smile at funerals. The rehearsed sorrow at farewells. The fake applause. The hollow faith. He covered the mirror with a cloth. But the truth was already etched inside his eyes. 2. The Woman Who Refused to Die She had been declared dead three times. Once by love. Once by betrayal. Once by society. But she came back. Each time quieter, stronger, more unreadable. Now when people see her walking— Elegant, poised, distant— They whisper, ...

  Urban Fables for a Tired World By Faraz Parvez (Pen Name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal) farazparvez1.blogspot.com Urban Fable #1: The Man Who Bought Silence In the noisiest part of the city—where horns never slept and gossip crawled through keyholes—lived a man named Altaf. He worked in a call center by day, and by night, he heard the city inside his skull. One evening, half-mad from insomnia and endless chatter, he found a strange man in the alley selling jars of silence. "Guaranteed quiet," the man said. "Just open one near you." Altaf bought three jars. He opened the first in traffic—it swallowed the honking whole. The second he opened at work—no more clacking keyboards or endless meetings. The third he saved for his apartment. When he opened it, the silence was so perfect it erased the ticking clock. The buzzing fridge. Even the hum of his thoughts. He tried to scream. But silence had taken his voice too. Now he sits in a soundless room. Peaceful. ...

  Special Feature: A Long Free Verse on Living a Happy Life in the Modern World Title: How to Stay Happy When the World Has Forgotten How By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) There is no golden age, no perfect decade, no utopian past to crawl back to. The world was always messy. But now it is neon-lit chaos— scrolling, buzzing, bleeding distraction, a theatre of instant rage and manufactured emptiness. And yet— we are told: Be happy. Smile more. Breathe. Buy something. Light a candle. Download a meditation app. Talk to your sadness like it’s a houseguest, not a squatters' gang living rent-free in your ribcage. This is not happiness. This is performance. And the audience is blind. So what does it mean to live truly happy when your phone cries more than your soul ever dares to? When every opinion is a warfront, every silence a suspicion, and joy is filtered through algorithms? Here’s...

  Title: “Love in the Age of Smoke and Mirrors” By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) They told us love would save us. They told us love would break chains, awaken hearts, transform the monsters we’d become. But no one told us that love, in its modern form, wears prosthetic skin, that it scrolls endlessly, tapping dopamine instead of hearts. Today, love is filtered—smooth, symmetrical, synthetic. A collage of convenience, carefully lit, its depth measured not in ache but in algorithm. What once cracked open ribs now needs Wi-Fi. What once defied empires now dies if left on “read.” Look at us: We chase digital ghosts who blink blue ticks and vanish, scripting affections on keyboards, offering intimacy in 280 characters but afraid to look into actual eyes. We fall in love with profiles, not people. We fall in love with our idea of being loved, not the labor of loving. Love used to demand surr...

  Experimental Short Story Series #60 Title: “The Last Door: A Farewell to Shadows” By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In a quiet corridor of memory and dream, a final door stands waiting. It is unlike the others—crafted not of wood or metal or ink, but of all the stories we’ve told. Sixty tales of ghosts and glass, of paper cities and whispered clocks, of forgotten gods and cursed mirrors, of boys who vanished, girls who remembered too much, and choices that rewrote the sky. This, dear reader, is the sixtieth. The Last Door opens onto a mirror world—one that reflects not just the writer’s mind, but yours. Every tale you lingered over, every twist you didn’t expect, every shadow that followed you long after the final line—that was part of the world we built together. And now, this chapter closes. Why We Told These Stories What began as an experimental challenge—a promise to craft 60 strange, surre...

  Experimental Short Story Series #59 Title: The City That Slept Too Long By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) farazparvez1.blogspot.com In the hush of a forgotten realm, veiled beyond maps and memory, there stood a city whose people slept not at night—but for a hundred years at a time. They called it Somnara , the Slumbering Citadel. The law was ancient and clear: when the great bell tolled, every citizen—from infants in cradles to elders in rocking chairs—would drink from the Dream Chalice and surrender to sleep. Life paused. Clocks stopped. Seasons froze. No one questioned why. No one remembered who made the rule. But one girl forgot to sleep. Her name was Elia, and she had hidden beneath the cathedral floorboards during the ritual. Not out of rebellion. Not out of fear. Simply because she’d fallen behind chasing a moth made of moonlight. When she surfaced, the world was silent. Not a bird. Not ...

  Experimental Short Story Series #58 Title: The Memory Dealer By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In the steel-gray alleys of Elysium-9 , memories weren’t sacred—they were sold. You could walk into any Recollection Parlor , plug a chip behind your ear, and taste someone else’s past for the right price. Want to feel what it’s like to win a war? That’s 300 credits. Want the thrill of your first kiss, even if it wasn’t yours? 180 credits. Heartbreak? 50. Childhood joy? 400. Memories were currency. Identity was a luxury. And then came Naya . A girl with no registration. No barcode. No parents. She wandered the edge of the Memory Market like static on a perfect broadcast. People ignored her until she began remembering things she never experienced—and things no one ever should. She recalled a man being executed in a memory not hers. A meeting in a mirrorless room where officials plotted to erase ...

  Experimental Short Story Series #57 Title: The City That Dreamed Too Loud By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) There once was a city that ran on dreams. Not oil. Not sunlight. Not nuclear sparks or hydropower. But dreams—bottled, filtered, amplified. Every night, millions lay down in their sleep-capsules, and their subconscious visions were harvested—siphoned into the city’s DreamCore. The laughter of a child flying through space powered the trains. A poet’s melancholic memory of lost love lit up the skyline. Even nightmares were useful: they powered the emergency systems and defense drones. It was beautiful. Until people stopped sleeping. Phase One: The Fray It began subtly. First with the rich, who replaced dreams with stimulants—“more hours to conquer the stock spirals,” they said. Then the artists, who feared their dreams were being stolen, refused to sleep at all. Eventually, the city’s wor...

  Experimental Short Story Series #56 Title: The City That Forgot Time By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) They called it “Nehir.” No one remembered why. Like everything else in the city, the name had always been there—etched on street signs, scribbled in dusty ledgers, whispered like a lullaby. But there were no clocks in Nehir. Not on towers. Not in homes. Not on wrists or walls or phones. Time had once mattered, surely—but somewhere along the line, it had slipped, like a loose thread tugged from the hem of history. No one noticed. People woke when the sun told them to. They worked until the sky turned amber. Shops opened and closed when they “felt” right. Meetings happened “later.” Birthdays were vague approximations—celebrated when the flowers bloomed or the snow melted. Children didn’t ask what year it was. They asked how tall they had grown. In Nehir, everyone was always now . Except th...

  Experimental Short Story Series #55 Title: The Boy Who Counted Silence By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) Blog: farazparvez1.blogspot.com In a wind-beaten orphanage by the salt flats, there lived a boy who never spoke. No one knew his real name. They just called him “Mute”—a word spat more than spoken. But silence wasn’t his weakness. It was his gift. He couldn’t say “yes” or “no,” “stop” or “go,” but he could hear everything that wasn’t said. When Sister Miriam laughed too brightly, he heard her sorrow. When boys lied about stolen bread, he counted the guilt clinging to their breath. And in the silence between dinner bells and lights-out prayers, he began to count. Not time. Not words. But truths. Silence #1: The cook wept when peeling onions—not from the sting, but from memory. Silence #27: The girl who slept near the furnace believed the stars were dead souls blinking. Silence #143: Siste...

  Experimental Short Story Series #54 Title: “The Man Who Heard the Stars” By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In a tiny village tucked between deserts and dead radio towers, lived a man with a crooked ear and a reputation no one understood. He claimed he could hear the stars. Not in metaphor. Not in poetry. He meant it plainly. Literally. As if the cosmos hummed lullabies just for him. His name was Sayeed, and he hadn’t slept in 27 years. The stars, he’d say, wouldn’t let him. At first, villagers mocked him—called him Majnoon or Shab-e-Firaaq . But over time, mockery turned into curiosity, and curiosity fermented into awe. Because when he’d sit on the hill under the ink-black sky, close his eyes, and listen, he’d come back whispering things no one should’ve known. A girl’s fever would break after he whispered “Betelgeuse breathes cool tonight.” A farmer, ready to sell his land, would find water...

  Experimental Short Story Series #53 Title: The Rain Collector By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) The village of Dhawa hadn’t seen rain in seven years. The land cracked like dry lips. Children were born never knowing the sound of thunder. Wells were nothing but hollow throats whispering dust. And people—once farmers, dreamers—now walked with heads bowed, as if ashamed of the sky. But one boy still looked up. His name was Nafi. He was thirteen, thin as a scarecrow, with eyes too old for his age. Every morning, he climbed the temple’s dead bell tower and stared at the empty heavens. “It’ll come,” he’d say. “Rain always returns.” The villagers thought him mad. Until the day he found the jar. It was buried beneath the roots of the banyan tree, where no grass grew and birds avoided. It was a simple thing—clay, cracked, with faint etchings of clouds and rivers. He lifted it, wiped it clean, and something...

    Experimental Short Story Series #53 Title: The Lighthouse That Dreamed By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) At the farthest edge of a salt-lashed cliff stood a lighthouse no ship had needed in decades. Its paint peeled like sorrow. Its lantern hadn’t been lit in years. Locals called it “The Sleeper” —not because it rested, but because it forgot . No keeper stayed long. They said the fog around it whispered. That sometimes the fog came from inside . But no one told that to Mariam. She arrived with her suitcase full of half-written poems and grief she never unpacked. A former astronomy student, she had volunteered for solitude, needing silence louder than sympathy. The lighthouse welcomed her. By the third week, it started to hum. Not from rust or sea wind—but from within its stones. At night, Mariam would wake to the sound of footsteps above, even though she lived alone. When she clim...

  Experimental Short Story Series #52 Title: “The Clockmaker’s Last Wish” Short Theme: A lonely clockmaker builds a clock that can freeze a single moment in time—forever. But when time stands still, he learns that eternity isn’t peace... it’s a prison. In a forgotten quarter of a city that no map names, lived a man who counted life not in years, but in ticks. Tick. Tock. Breathe. Work. Tick again. He was the last clockmaker of a dying tradition, surrounded by brass gears, glass domes, and the kind of silence that grows thick and permanent. People no longer came to mend time—they simply bought new time, digital and disposable. But the clockmaker, grey-bearded and bent, still labored beneath an oil lamp. For years, he worked on a single timepiece. One he called Aakhiri Tamanna — The Last Wish. This was no ordinary clock. It held a chamber of starlight, a pendulum made from the bone of a meteor, and a mechanism so intricate even the moon seemed to slow when it chimed. Its p...

  Experimental Short Story Series #51 Title: The City That Hired Dreams By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In Neo-Lyra , a city glittering with chrome spires and insomnia, dreams weren’t private anymore. They were professions. Syndicates paid citizens for their subconscious stories, harvested them nightly, and sold the fragments to studios, advertisers, and war strategists. You didn’t dream for yourself in Neo-Lyra. You dreamed for the market. Kian was just a boy—twelve, maybe thirteen. A nobody in a crowded block tower. His parents had already signed their dreams away. But Kian hadn’t registered. He couldn’t. Because every night, he had the same dream. A dream of falling—but never landing. Only this wasn’t the theatrical kind with symbolism and metaphors. It was real. The air burned. The horizon trembled. A scream echoed. His own. But deeper. Older. Like it didn’t belong to him. One night, someon...

  Experimental Short Story Series #50 Title: The Girl Who Spoke in Algorithms By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) They called it The Optimization. A global recalibration of human life—where emotions were declared inefficient, messy, unstable. Nations agreed: feeling was a bug. And so, they coded it out. Now every child, at the age of seven, received their Algorithm Implant—surgical and silent. Joy became a function: Jx = Output of Success . Sadness was deleted. Love, compressed into 01100110. Except her. She had no name in the government grid, just a blinking red error code: Null-7 . She was born during a system crash. No implant. No barcode. No script. And she couldn’t speak. But she could write . In the dim underground libraries banned long ago, she learned the old languages—English, Urdu, Arabic, Python, and something stranger still: the syntax of the soul. She called it Emotocode . At first, i...

  Experimental Short Story Series #49 Title: The Boy Who Bottled Time By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In a narrow alley where old clocks coughed and chimed out of rhythm, nestled between a tea shop and a forgotten bookstore, lived a boy named Saif who could bottle time. Not metaphorically. Not in poetic clichés. Literally. He found it by accident—tinkering with the gears of an old pendulum clock while it rained so hard the world outside seemed paused. A twist too tight. A spring pulled too far. And then— click —the second hand stopped… but the rain didn’t. Everything else outside his shop slowed to a syrupy crawl while he moved freely inside. When the second hand ticked again, it all returned to normal. But Saif had changed. He began experimenting. Trapping five minutes in a jar. A whole hour in a crystal flask. He built shelves. Labels. Sealed lids with wax. And soon, in the back of his clock...

  Experimental Short Story Series #48 Title: The Library That Ate People By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In the town of Dunmere—where fog sat like a cat on windowsills and clocks ran a few minutes late, always—stood a library no one remembered building. It wasn’t on the map. No one paid the librarian. Yet it was always there. Nestled between a shuttered bakery and a silent watch shop, it loomed taller on some days than others. Its bricks seemed to rearrange when no one was looking. Children dared each other to touch the lion-headed doorknob. Most didn’t. Those who did… changed. They said the books whispered. Not pages rustling—no, actual voices. Some sighed with longing. Others chuckled darkly. A few screamed. The townsfolk pretended not to hear, but everyone knew someone who had gone in and hadn’t come out quite the same. Some never came out at all. And still… it called. One rainy Thursday, ...

  Experimental Short Story Series #47 Title: The Boy Who Rewound Time By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In a crumbling Karachi neighborhood where kites tangled in wires and time felt like a tired grandfather nodding off, there lived a boy named Samir who didn’t speak much. His mother said he was “born with old silence in his bones.” He liked broken things—cracked mirrors, rusted clocks, chipped radios—and believed they remembered more than they let on. One day, behind a stack of cassette tapes in a junk shop that smelt of mothballs and memories, Samir found a dusty cassette player. It was silver. Heavy. With buttons like old typewriter keys. A hand-written label was taped to its back: “For Rewinding Time. Use Carefully.” He thought it was a joke. Until that night. He rewound a tape he'd recorded of himself mumbling a poem. And when he pressed play, the room didn’t echo with the poem—it rewoun...

  Experimental Short Story Series #46 Title: The Man Who Sold Shadows By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In the ash-hued alleys of Noorabad—a city where lanterns never flickered, but shadows danced even at noon—there existed a trade no one spoke of openly. Not gold, not gems, not secrets. Shadows. They were currency among the elite. A senator’s shadow could buy an entire district. A poet’s silhouette was rumored to grant dreams. The bigger, darker, and older your shadow, the more powerful your place in the city’s invisible hierarchy. And so, under a cracked dome of sky, among beggars with broken sandals and hollow eyes, lived a man named Basit. No surname. No past. Only a shadow that clung to him like regret—long, unruly, and darker than midnight ink. One day, a man in a sapphire coat and shoes stitched from raven feathers approached him. "That’s a rare shadow," the man said. "How muc...

  Experimental Short Story Series #45 Title: The Girl Who Drew Doors By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In the ghost-grey halls of an unnamed orphanage, where days dragged like rain and every corridor smelt faintly of bleach and broken promises, lived a girl no one remembered arriving and no one dared to speak to. She had no name—only a number stitched to her coat: 45. But she had a pencil. A dull, chewed-up, half-dead stub of a thing she guarded like a secret. It had no eraser, no shine—just a whisper of lead. And every night, while others whispered ghost stories beneath moth-eaten blankets, she’d crouch by the wall behind her iron bed and draw. Doors. Big ones. Small ones. Some with keyholes. Some with brass knockers shaped like wolves or owls. She didn’t know why she drew them. Only that when she finished one, the air would shift—crackling like lightning bottled just beneath her skin. The first ...

  Experimental Short Story Series #44 Title: “The Botanist’s Last Letter” By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA) Blog Post: There are stories rooted in time—and there are those that bloom beyond it. Welcome, dear readers, to the 44th installment of our ongoing Experimental Short Story Series , where narrative bends, logic trembles, and language surrenders to imagination. Today, we unfold “The Botanist’s Last Letter” —a tale that germinates at the intersection of environmental memory, scientific solitude, and the frail pulse of human remorse. A story told in fragments, like petals drifting from a forgotten bloom. The Story: After decades of ecological collapse and silent pandemics, the cities have become archives of glass and moss. Somewhere near the overgrown skeletal dome of the once-celebrated National Botanical Research Institute, an elderly botanist returns to the ruins of her life’s work. ...

  Experimental Short Story Series #43 Title: The Clockmaker’s Dilemma By Faraz Parvez (pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, former faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) Blog Post: Tick. Tock. Regret. Repeat. Welcome back, dear readers, to the 43rd installment of our much-celebrated 60 Experimental Short Stories Series . Today’s tale bends time not through science, but through sorrow—and the ticking of a clock that doesn’t mark minutes, but missed chances. We bring you “The Clockmaker’s Dilemma” —a haunting meditation on memory, redemption, and the dangerous seduction of second chances. Our protagonist is a quiet horologist named Yaqoob Mirza—a man whose life is a harmony of gears, springs, and solitude. One rainy evening, tucked in a forgotten drawer of his late father’s study, he discovers a peculiar pocket watch. Its glass face is fogged, its hands trembling. But what it reveals is no ordinary time. This is a watch that marks regret —each tick echoing a moment...

  Experimental Short Story Series #42 Title: “The Librarian Who Filed Souls” By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA) Welcome back, dear readers, to another surreal stop in our journey through the genre-bending landscape of experimental short fiction. With this 42nd installment of our celebrated 60-Story Experimental Series , we invite you to wander the shadowed corridors of memory, myth, and metaphysics—this time, within the crumbling walls of a library that archives more than knowledge. It preserves the soul. This tale isn’t just a story—it’s a question wrapped in parchment, filed under “E” for eternity . The Librarian Who Filed Souls The city no longer remembered his name. Not in its maps, not in its census, not even in the graffiti that bloomed like moss over rusted benches. But there he was— thin, owl-eyed, and silent , gliding between oakwood shelves in a library that time had forgotten. Som...