Maya decides to move away from the city, settling for a quiet neighborhood just outside the hustle and bustle. When she gets there, she plans to get into the quiet life, but soon, that life is disrupted when she notices that the woman across the road is up to something.
When I moved to the outskirts of the city, I was searching for peace.
After 32 years of city noise, suffocating crowds, and the endless hustle for more, I was done. I wanted quiet. I wanted serenity. A place where I could breathe. But also, a place where I could just sit down and write all the stories that were waiting to come out of me.So, I found a charming little house on the edge of a small neighborhood. The kind of place where everyone knew everyone, where time sort of seemed to slow down.
But what I got was something else entirely. “Well, you’re in it now, Maya,” I said to myself, making myself a cup of tea.
My closest neighbor was a woman in her 60s named Mrs. Harrington, who lived in an old house that had seen better days. The paint was peeling, the shutters hung crookedly, and the lawn was overgrown with weeds.“Maybe she’s just old and doesn’t have the energy to maintain the house?” my mother said on the phone. “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Her house just looks a bit out of place.” But that wasn’t what caught my attention. What really intrigued me was the little shack about 20 feet away from Mrs. Harrington’s house. It was small, barely more than a shed, with a rusty tin roof and walls that looked anything but steady. “Why would anyone have that?” I muttered as I sat on my couch, looking out the window.
The more I wanted to sit down and write my collection of stories, the more obsessed I got with Mrs. Harrington. Because it wasn’t the shack that was a mystery. It was the woman herself. From the moment I moved in, she had been distant, almost to the point of being rude. “I’m Maya,” I said on the first day when I was inspecting my new backyard.I expected her to at least say hello and introduce herself. But she avoided eye contact, brushed off any attempts at conversation, and made it clear that she wasn’t interested in neighborly chats. I only discovered her name because I heard one of the neighborhood kids calling her on his newspaper round.
