‘Half Woman’ by Khalida Hussain, translated from the Urdu by Haider Shahbaz

A woman wakes up one morning and finds that her right eye is not aligned with her left eye. Not much goes on to happen on the surface. In short simple sentences we follow the thought process of the woman as she tries to make sense of what may happened to cause the misalignment, but occasionally, and this happens so suddenly that I feel like I have been doused with cold water, the woman plunges towards what feels like the most truthful part of her consciousness before coming up again to the benign surface of her life. This is possibly the strangest, most mind boggling story I have read. A reminder of how many different ways there are for short stories to be.

This translation first published in Almost Island, 2020. Read online here