Short Story: Raja's Gold

Nowadays, the art of reading has lost ground for a whole generation of scrollers who are addicted to video clips and the even shorter version of them called shorts.

While you are able to watch a story as portrayed in a video or movie, try reading the printed version of the story for a fresh take. Amongst other things, reading will help you to:

- Focus, concentrate and think in order to understand and take in the story.

- Learn more about the background story of the characters in the story and relate to them with empathy as they struggle with their problems or threats, and root for those you like.

- Learn to listen to the storyteller, suspend your opinion/bias/control, and hear out another's perspective and motivation which may not be your cup of tea.

- Find a sense of accomplishment as you reach the end of story and find that you have expanded the horizon of your understanding and feelings for other people as they were so alive under the magical wand of a masterful storyteller.

Here then is a short story, Raja's Gold, generated with the help of ChatGPT for your refreshing:-

"The wet market still smelled like damp morning air, ginger, and old stories. Maya passed by stall 47—their stall—for the first time in months. The signboard still had the faded red outline of a rooster and the corner where Raj used to hang his towel, still held the rusty hook. For a second, her steps faltered. But only for a second.

They had spent nearly four decades there—scaling chicken, cracking jokes with uncles in fish stalls, giving out a few extra grams to regular aunties. When they retired, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were going to take up tai chi, maybe travel a little, or finally repaint the kitchen in periwinkle like she always wanted. But two weeks after retirement, Raj’s cough turned to a diagnosis, and the days blurred into nights at the hospital where time felt both cruel and kind in how slowly it passed.

And then, it was just her.

Grief, she found, wasn’t loud. It wasn’t like the tearing sobs in dramas or the wailing she once thought she’d feel. No—it was in the quiet moments. In the silence of two teacups on the drying rack. In the way she still reached for the passenger seat to point out a passing bird. In how, at dawn, her ears strained for the sound of slippers dragging across the kitchen floor.

But Maya didn’t break.

She folded Raj’s shirts neatly into a bag and gave them to a foreign worker shelter. She kept the one with the burnt iron mark—they used to argue about that—and turned it into a cushion cover. She wore his wedding ring on a chain around her neck, not for show, but for gravity.

What she did next, though, surprised even herself.

She joined a neighborhood gardening group.

Raj had never liked plants. Said they invited mosquitoes. But Maya remembered how he always admired orchids when they passed by the void deck planters. He would pause, call them "divas," and chuckle. So she signed up. She didn’t know a trowel from a fork, but she learned. Her hands, once used to plucking feathers and scaling chicken feet, found new rhythm in the soil.

Every morning, just before sunrise, she watered the plants, especially a pot of yellow orchids she named "Raja’s Gold." A few retirees began to linger. Then came the kids. She taught one boy how to repot basil. He called her “Aunty Chicken,” and she laughed more in that moment than she had in months.

She began baking. Banana walnut loaf, because Raj had once said he liked it, even though he always picked out the walnuts. She brought them to dialysis centres, temple kitchens, and sometimes left them anonymously at doorsteps of folks she knew were struggling.

She wasn’t “over” it. You don’t get over love like that.

But she was walking alongside it now.

Once, at the hawker centre, a friend asked, “Maya, how're you coping?”

She sipped her kopi, eyes soft. “Like learning to use my left hand when I’m right-handed. Clumsy, slow... but every day, I still cook, still laugh, still carry on.”

The friend nodded with a hint of relief on her face.

One afternoon, she sat with a younger widow from block 103. They didn’t speak much. Just sipped tea, the clink of porcelain filling the silence. Finally, Maya said, “You never forget. But you find new ways to remember. And some days, you even smile at the remembering.”

The woman exhaled like she’d been holding her breath for weeks.

That was the thing about life, Maya realised. Fragile like an eggshell, but inside it—if warmed and tended to—held the stuff of beginnings. She wasn’t waiting to be whole again. She was collecting the pieces and making something meaningful with them. Not perfect. But real.

She planted more orchids. Told more stories. Held more hands.

And in the quiet before dawn, sometimes, she swore she could hear the soft shuffle of slippers in the kitchen.

But now, she no longer cried.

She whispered, “Good morning, Raj. Today, the orchids are blooming.”

And life, in all its brief, breakable beauty, went on."

Click here for more stories at Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.

Click here for more stories at Narrative Magazine.

Thank you for reading Daily Refreshing.