Trauma In The Jungle

• Aamna Adeel, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2022

Darkness…
It is the first thing that peered into my memory. I started to remember breathing and falling; a parachute to rest my fall. There I was, in an unfathomable forest restoring my vision, only to lay my eyes upon ruins… Ruins of an army aircraft set ablaze…
My friends and fellow soldiers, lying on the forest floor, eyes half closed, half opened. Singes and scars visible like an elephant among ants. Flashbacks thwarted my mind, like multiple gunshots against the heart. I gazed upon my friends, laying in peace…
Trauma enveloped me; it felt like the trees were crying in woe, dropping water from the tips of their leaves. A rustle came in the distance, and at an instant I stood my ground, taking caution in every step. A furry creature with fangs as sharp as knives; fur dancing in the wind. It had the size of a jaguar, but with the tenacity of a lion – a creature known as the Huruk. Very few were left in the world, many believed the species to be extinct. The Huruk took hold of my friend’s leg with its ferocious teeth and consumed it amongst the flames.
The beast kept its eyes on the hunt, ingesting more dead soldiers who had been killed from the plane crash. I felt this deep feeling in my heart, I cannot tell whether it is a sudden loss of hope, or just pure loneliness, like a piece of my heart had been physically torn and had left the rest of my heart in a mess. I felt my head throbbing, was it that I had suffered a blow to the head on my entrance into this forest or a desire… A desire to kill…
I tore apart a piece of the aeroplane wing, which had been a vector of doom for all those who had gone aboard the aircraft. While the Huruk was caught off guard whilst consuming another one of its victims, I stabbed it in its heart, piercing his soul…
I gazed at its eyes while it was screaming in pain, those were not eyes of a monster, they were eyes of any one living being that needed to feed to survive. As the Huruk lay in its last moments I realised that it’s just like any creature out there, and is one of the last of its species, that has been fighting for survival, and it should not have to pay for just following nature’s rules.
Woe and grief had stayed with me for the next few days for the loss of my friends from the army. I had this constant guilt deep within myself on why I could not let nature take its course and kill me along with my friends. I now live as a Huruk, fighting for survival.