O’ Level students are fully clear on this point that when getting hold of a topic for story writing, and intending to use first person pronoun ‘I’, they can pose to be anybody, like a mom, a baby, a shopkeeper, an elderly person or a young man etc. See the way Muhammad Abubakar Mian seized the topic, triggered/prompted his imaginative explosive to cause this ‘big bang’ you call ‘a short story’. Intensely engaging right from the first word he dropped onto the sheet, the story is compellingly believable. With crispy, punchy sentences most naturally gushing out like a water spring, and well-connected like pieces in a chain, the story itself unfolds all information, the background, the present scenario and a likely future. You’d feel as if you were watching this incident with your own eyes. It’s like a Hollywood movie scene.

Muhammad Abubakar Mian was asked to generate a short story using the following two sentences anywhere in the text.

“Blood was still oozing out of his nose…”

“I had never expected her to betray me like that.”

Blood was still oozing out of his nose as I slammed him against the wall and continued to beat him to a pulp. His tattered shirt was red all over, but no amount of bleeding would stop my onslaught. My fury of punches continued to rain down on him as I blocked out the screams of my wife. She pleaded me to calm down, but that was like asking a bull to stop and wait as an entertainer tied his shoes - impossible. In retrospect, I’m not exactly sure where all that intense energy had come from, but come it did, and when it came, it was violent. 

The stranger had touched my wife in the privacy of my home. I use the word “stranger” lightly as he was a stranger to me but might not have been a stranger to these walls. My wife could have let him in on a number of occasions. This was a possibility that I did not want to believe, but was forced to at least consider. I had never expected her to betray me like that. These thoughts raced through my mind as my one-sided offensive continued. 

There was one thought that resonated throughout my body more so than the others: ‘This was my fault. It was my neglect that had led my wife to what she has done.’ She was not to blame, and neither was the man at the receiving end of my fists. The latter was only taking advantage of the former’s unfortunate situation. The thought of this magnified my anger ten-fold, but it was through this anger that I realized the man before me was now motionless. His whimpering had subsided and his body grew cold. The next sound I heard was that of a police siren going off somewhere in the distance as two men in blue jackets kicked down the door.