Mystic Brew

Can I flash a tiny bit of fiction your way?

Challenge: pack as much story as you can into around 250 words.

***

Kamala reached across her rickety tea cart and handed a mint-scented cup to the stranger. As their fingers touched, he shuddered, eyes gleaming like ammolite gemstones.

Moments earlier, he had been just another silhouette hurtling through the sun-dappled medina. Aloof yet open to refreshment.

The stranger approached…

Beneath his politeness was a peculiar unease. His words wavered like echoes of a loss he dared not speak of. Through this absence, his sorrow had calcified to a numbing pain.

Kamala could feel it. All of it. This was her gift. She could breach any fortress of pretence. Plunge beneath and extract that pain, prising it open and plucking a pearl of possibility.

She fixed him with a compassionate look, the kind Kamala’s nana used to offer when she felt at odds with the world. Then she cast out a simple lifeline: “There are no happy endings, only new beginnings.

“Time to let go … and follow Imaan to Dukhara.”

Kamala had always felt more intensely than others. But those feelings were not hers. What did she see when she turned her gaze inward, palm pressed against her chest as if she was scanning her own soul?

Nothing. A void, cloistered and desolate.

Just then, the man returned and took her hand.

“Remember Edesor?” he said.

Kamala recoiled in disbelief, jolted by the past.

“Elit is there. You can still save her if you go now.”

Kamala fell back to her seat, replaying a flurry of memories as they burst out from an abandoned chamber in her mind.

The stranger vanished.

­Later that afternoon, she packed up her cart and walked towards the station, clasping a one-way ticket … to peril.

***
What thoughts, questions or feelings did this prompt? Tell me…