Ahmad had owned the magic window for as long as he could remember. It wasn’t large—just an old wooden frame, worn smooth by years of touch—but the glass inside was unlike anything else in the world.

When Ahmad looked through it, he didn’t see the narrow street outside his modest home. Instead, the window showed where he needed to be most. Sometimes it revealed a garden far away where his grandmother waited for a visit. Other times, it opened onto the cool, quiet shore of the lake where he went to think. And once, just once, it had shown him a man standing on a train platform, smiling, who would later become his husband.

The window never lied. It guided him when he felt lost, and it comforted him when the world felt too large.

So, when he came home one evening and found it cracked, jagged lines running across the glass like black lightning, his stomach dropped. The view on the other side was hazy, distorted, as if the world it showed had been submerged underwater.

He touched the glass carefully. It was cold. One of the cracks pulsed faintly, like it was alive.

“No, no, no…” he whispered.

Ahmad spent days searching the markets for anyone who could repair enchanted glass. Most merchants just laughed. One old man in the spice bazaar listened, then shook his head. “Once a magic window is broken, it cannot be mended,” he said. “Its sight is gone forever.”

But Ahmad refused to believe that.

He returned home and set the window on his work table. He tried polishing the glass, tracing the cracks with silver dust, even reciting the old rhymes his grandmother used to hum. Nothing worked. The images stayed clouded, shifting like shadows behind fog.

On the third night, he sat staring at the fractured view. For the first time, he realized he couldn’t make out anything. Not even a hint of where he was meant to be.

And that’s when it struck him: maybe the window wasn’t broken at all.

Maybe it was telling him that, after all these years, he no longer needed to be shown the way.

The thought scared him. He’d built his life on the guidance it gave him. Without it, how would he know if he was making the right choices?

But another part of him, quiet and uncertain, felt something almost like relief.

In the morning, Ahmad carried the frame to the back garden. He laid it in the soft earth beneath the fig tree and buried it there. When he was done, he stood in the sunlight, breathing the warm air, listening to the sounds of his street.

No visions. No directions. Only the world as it was.

And for the first time in years, Ahmad stepped forward without looking for the window.

And, you know I mustn’t neglect the obligatory shameless self-promotion. New Yesterdays is available through the following links: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.