Mortal Beings

Mortal Beings is a 2022 anthology published by Aspiring Pens, gathering twenty independent writers whose chapters together form a sweeping, honest portrait of what being human actually costs and what it occasionally rewards. The title is the book's quiet thesis: mortality is not simply the fact of death, but the entire texture of a life lived in a body that loves, suffers, grieves, doubts, and endures; and every chapter in the anthology explores a different facet of that texture. Some chapters are lyrical and tender; poems about brown eyes that carry sunrise, love mentioned quietly to God in the third of the night, a husband seen praying who becomes the most beautiful thing his wife has ever witnessed, and letters to Allah that arrive at the only language adequate for awe. Others are raw and unflinching stories of a girl writing through suicidal ideation and self-harm; a man confronting the disintegration of his mind through depression and melancholy; a poem about a woman trapped in an abusive marriage asking "why her?"; and a harrowing short story in which a 95-year-old mother finally tells her daughter about six years of childhood abuse in her uncle's basement, rendered through the fragile metaphor of a flower whose petals can be plucked and still regrow. Loss surfaces in many forms: the death of a father whose footsteps are still heard on the stairs; a friendship that has grown silent and ghost-like; grief over a grandmother's passing; and the quiet, ordinary devastation of love that ends without ceremony. Faith runs as a sustaining thread through the whole collection: poems addressed to Allah, meditations on Sujood and divine plans, and the discovery that God's presence is the only anchor that holds in the dark, written not as performance but as genuine conversation. Philosophically, several chapters push into existential territory, asking what identity is, whether we are ever truly ourselves or merely collections of everything we have absorbed, and whether chaos is a problem to be solved or simply the permanent human condition to be chosen. Mortal Beings earns its title on every page, not by dwelling in death, but by insisting that everything these twenty writers have lived, felt, and written is the evidence of a life that was genuinely, irreducibly, mortal.