The Open Window – Saki (H.H. Munro, 1914)

“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.”

Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece without unduly discounting the aunt. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.

“I know how it will be,” his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to this rural retreat; “you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice.”

Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was presenting one of the letters of introduction, came into the nice division.

“Do you know many of the people round here?” asked the niece, when she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.

“Hardly a soul,” said Framton. “My sister was staying here, at the rectory, you know, about four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the people here.”

He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.

“Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?” pursued the self-possessed young lady.

“Only her name and address,” admitted the caller. He was wondering whether Mrs. Sappleton was married or widowed when the niece answered his unspoken question.

“Her great tragedy happened just three years ago,” said the child; “that would be since your sister’s time.”

“Her tragedy?” asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot tragedies seemed out of place.

“You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon,” said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened on to a lawn.

“It is quite warm for the time of the year,” said Framton; “but has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?”

“Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered.”

Here the child’s voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. “Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it gets quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out—her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’ as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window—”

She broke off with a shudder.

It was a relief to Framton when the aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her appearance.

“I hope Vera has been amusing you,” she said.

“She has been very interesting,” said Framton.

“I hope you don’t mind the open window,” said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; “my husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in this way. They’ve been out for snipe in the marshes to-day, so they’ll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you menfolk, isn’t it?”

She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk to a less ghastly topic, and was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond.

It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.

“The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise,” announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one’s ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure. “On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement,” he continued.

“No?” said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice that was sharply different in tone from the one she had been using earlier.

She was staring out through the open window with a look of dazed horror in her eyes.

“It’s them at last!” she cried. “Just in time for tea, and don’t they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!”

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic understanding. The child was staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes.

In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them had a white coat slung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels.

Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out: “I say, Bertie, why do you bound?”

Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall door, the gravel drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat.

A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.

“Here we are, my dear,” said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window. “Fairly muddy, but most of it’s dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up?”

“A most extraordinary man — a Mr. Nuttel,” said Mrs. Sappleton. “He could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of goodbye or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost.”

“I expect it was the spaniel,” said the niece calmly; “he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve.”

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

THE GIFT OF THE MAGI — O. Henry (Original 1905 Text)

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham Young.”

The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of “Dillingham” looked blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above, he was called “Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling—something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out next door to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with a brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: “Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.” One flight up Della ran and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”

“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.

“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at it.”

Down rippled the brown cascade.

“Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practiced hand.

“Give it to me quick,” said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain, simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly because of the old leather strap he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends—a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection and said, “If Jim doesn’t kill me before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do—oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?”

At seven o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della held the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: “Please God, make him think I am still pretty.”

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two—and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read that terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror—any of the sentiments she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and ran to him.

“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again. You won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say ‘Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a nice—what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”

“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.

“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”

Jim looked about the room curiously.

“You say your hair is gone?” he said with an air almost of idiocy.

“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and gone too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction.

Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The Magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.

“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.”

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch—I want to see how it looks on it.”

Instead of obeying, Jim sank down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em awhile. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”

The Magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were doubtless wise ones—possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house.

But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts, these two were the wisest.

Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the wisest. Everywhere they are the wisest. They are the Magi.

Memory Market - A Sci-Fi Short Story About Sacrifice, Memories & Humanity

In Neo-Delhi 2099, memories were no longer private — they were currency.

The Memory Exchange Tower, a hundred-floor glass giant, stood like a silent predator in the center of the city. Here, the rich bought beautiful memories to relive joy, and the poor sold their past piece by piece just to survive. Prices were displayed like stocks — childhood laughter, first love kiss, a parent’s warm embrace — everything had value.

A Father’s Desperation

Raghav wasn’t always poor. Once he was a happy man — until an incurable disease struck his 8-year-old daughter, Tara. The treatment was expensive, and time was running out.

He tried everything — jobs, loans, charities — nothing was enough.

There was only one option left: Sell his happiest memory.

That memory wasn’t just a moment. It was his wife — dancing barefoot in the rain, holding his face, laughing with love. She died years ago, and that memory was all he had left of her.

But to save his daughter, he walked into the Memory Exchange.

The Transaction

The machine was a silver helmet covered with glowing wires. The clerk, emotionless as a robot, didn’t even look up when he said:

 “Extract: Happiest Memory. Level A.”

Raghav hesitated only for a second — then nodded.

The world went white.

When he opened his eyes, he remembered everything about his wife — except that one memory. The image was gone. The warmth was gone. The love was dimmer now.

But the money was there.

Tara survived.

A Dangerous Realization

Weeks later, on the news:

 “A mysterious pattern has been discovered in purchased memories — suggesting a hidden conspiracy in the Memory Market.”

Whispers spread that memories weren’t just emotions — they contained codes, clues, and even government secrets buried inside neural layers.

One night, a stranger came to his door — a woman in a black coat.

 “Your memory… the one you sold… did you ever wonder why it was the highest bidder in weeks?”

Raghav felt a chill.

The woman continued:

“Inside it was something you weren’t supposed to know — something your wife saw, something they need to erase forever.”

Raghav’s heart pounded. But he couldn’t remember what it was.

The Fight for Truth

The woman offered a deal:

“Help us steal that memory back — it might save thousands of lives.”

Raghav agreed—not because he cared about conspiracies, but because he wanted that piece of his wife back.

They broke into the Memory Exchange Tower — alarms, drones, guards everywhere — and reached the Vault of Premium Memories. Thousands floated in glass pods like captured fireflies.

Then he saw it.

A glowing sphere labeled: A-Class: Rain Dance — Owner Raghav Verma

When he touched the pod, the memory surged back into his brain.

And with it — the truth.

His wife had witnessed something horrifying years ago — a secret plan to control the population by rewriting memories. That night in the rain, she wasn't laughing out of joy — she was crying in terror while pretending to smile so he wouldn’t worry.

She died because she knew too much.

They had come for her.

Now they were coming for him.

A Final Choice

Raghav held the memory pod — inside it was truth the world needed… and the last piece of love he had for his wife.

But the system was rigged — once the pod left the vault, it would self-destruct unless uploaded publicly.

If he uploaded it, the truth would save millions. But he would lose the memory forever.

He whispered through tears:

“I won’t let your death be for nothing.”

He pressed upload.

The pod shattered.

The memory vanished from him forever.

Aftermath

Riots broke out. The city demanded justice. The Memory Market collapsed — and people realized memories were not products but identity, humanity, and freedom.

Tara grew up safe. Raghav raised her with love… even if he could no longer remember the woman who taught him how to love.

Sometimes he stood in the rain without knowing why.

But somehow, he always smiled.

The First Hair Cut

 In 

a tiny village in traditional India lived a girl named Ananya.

There is one silent rule in society every girl to have long hair—

long hair was not just beauty, it was identity.

Mothers braided their daughters’ hair every morning.

Grandmothers proudly applied oil to strengthen it.

Teachers praised students whose hair reached their waist.

And everyone repeated the same sentence:

> “A good girl always keeps her hair long.”

But Ananya… was different.

She didn’t hate beauty — she simply dreamed of short hair. 

The heavy braid hurt her head. The daily oiling annoyed her.

She wanted to run fast, feel light, study freely, live freely.

Every time she looked at the mirror she whispered,

 “Why can’t I have short hair like boys?”

Whenever she asked, her mother would reply:

 “Girls must keep long hair. It shows respect, tradition, and discip”

So Ananya waited quietly.

Years passed, and while the other girls took pride in their long shiny braids,

Ananya secretly imagined herself with a short and fearless haircut. 

After her studies, Ananya received a job letter from Mumbai, a big city she had dreamed of.

Her father hesitated, her mother cried, relatives gossiped.

“Living alone in a city? It’s not right for a girl.”

But Ananya didn’t step back.

She packed her clothes, her certificates, and her courage.

The moment she reached Mumbai, she took a deep breath.

The noise, the lights, the independence — it was overwhelming, but perfect.

The very next day, she walked into a salon.

Her hands trembled.

The old rule echoed in her head: “Good girls keep long hair.”

The stylist asked gently,

 “Are you sure?”

Ananya smiled for the first time in years.

“I’ve never been more sure.”

And the scissors began their music — snip, snip, snip.

When the braid fell, her heart felt lighter than her head.

She looked in the mirror —

Not just a new hairstyle…

but a new woman.

Ananya visited her home months later.

Everyone stared at her short haircut, stunned.

But they also noticed something else —

her confidence, her happiness, her success.

Her mother looked into her eyes and finally understood.

 “Hair does not decide who our daughter is.

Her courage does.”