Storyy Hut

A sense of renewed vigor laced her steps as she trotted back home, absorbing the curious little affairs of people around her. For once, she felt that she wasn’t chasing time but rather walking with it. Walking under the shower of autumn­-­burned leaves, under an overcast sky, helped in calming her nerves, a gentle gush of wind caressing her out of any remaining misery. It was only a matter of a few moments before she found herself at the doorstep of her home again. With jerky steps filled with impatient glee, she fetched her car keys and took, quite surprisingly, her baba’s car for a spin. It was kept untouched in her garage since her baba’s demise, perhaps as a token of his memory. She slid into the seat. The engine roared to life, and with it, so did her memories—her baba's laughter, the winding roads, gelato in the afternoons. For hours, she drove around the city, taking roads that led to old, forgotten bonds of friendship—delicate threads, woven and broken apart by the ...

Mud swallowed every step that private Thompson took. The November rain had turned the mooring lands of Hürtgen Forest into a sucking mire, its damp air reeking of decay and rot. He trudged forward, armed with his mud covered rifle, in this eerily silent forest with its trees casting a suffocating gloom over him. Last night, his regiment had been ambushed by the Germans, forcing them to disperse in the dead of night to avoid being gun down. He remembered losing the company of his comrades, and then his balance as he tripped midflight in this usurping mud land. The next thing he knew; he was in the middle of nowhere in this hellish battle land. Alone and forgotten. But then he saw them, in a distance, a heart-wrenching march of death. He hid, he crawled through the muddy swampy land till he reached a point where these wavering figurines took the shape of soldiers- slow but fluid and unwavering in their movements. They stood in the mist-shrouded trench ahead. Their uniforms were old—b...

Fathima woke up drenched in sweat, her throat parched, her breath ragged with panic, and her mind was singly focused on the terrible ordeal she had just gone through. A dream, however peculiar or daunting, could not have loosened her spirits, however it was the mystery around her dreams from the past week that seemed to unnerve Fathima. Every night, in the tranquility of her sleep, she dreamt of a man- wise in age and serene in disposition- who foretold her future… an event, a fair warning. Though she initially brushed it off as a mere coincidence, the repetition had begun to scare her and today, her fright had reached her Zenith for the man had possibly foretold her death- “The end of this life for her”- to be precise with his words. She glanced at the scar on her arm from her accident last week- yet another instance of her dream manifesting itself into reality. Icy shackles of fear gripped her and suffocated her, prompting her to gasp for breath. This continued for some moment...