Ani: Directed Writing

His eyes fluttered opened. Through his dazzled gaze, he scanned the strange unfamiliar surrounding around him in a blur. All he could make out was the faint figures of monstrous trees with huge crawling branches reflecting the moonlight in a luminous glow. He tried to sit up, but there was a sharp jab of pain on his stomach, forcing him to lie back down. Strange. He was bleeding but yet he could not recall what might have caused that wound on his body. Even stranger is that he was wearing what seems to be an army uniform -of what country or division he had no notion. Hoping that the pain would go away, he stared into the starless night sky, groping at the back of his mind for any memories of the last thing that could have happened to him. There was the wet dark brown sand of the Muara beach of that one ominous day, the wind was blowing hard from the sea and Maria was pointing at a strange carved headstone jutting from the point where the stretch of sand ends and grass ground starts to appear. He knew then that the carving was in Jawi or possibly Arabic but he could not read it. They went too far that day; they went far to the end of the beach, towards that thick patch of jungle where no beachheads have ever dared to go to. He remembered that faint boisterous murmur coming from the thick jungle, like a chanting bearing an evil intention. It suddenly dawned on him that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Before he could do anything, Maria’s piercing scream broke the silence, and abruptly everything just went black.