Dreams of Trees

You drove up in a black car right after my parents' funeral and asked me to
get in, and maybe I climbed in because you looked just like my mother had in
her old photos, before she and my father became astronauts and died in a
crash thousands of miles above the earth, or maybe it was just because my
dress was scratchy and my shoes were too tight. My grandmother was busy
crying into her handkerchief and being comforted by some relatives, so no
one saw me go. The first words you said were "Happiness is something you
have to make yourself."
I was eight. I had stayed up until midnight a month before to watch the
space shuttle launch on my grandmother's ancient television. The funeral
had been a military one, with speeches made by government people about
the sacrifices my parents had made. But I kind of knew their bodies weren't
inside the coffins, because the shuttle had malfunctioned somewhere far
away in space. Secretly inside, I thought that their bodies were orbiting the
earth. Floating somewhere up there.
You took me to a forest where the trees grew so thickly that I couldn't see the
sky, and shadows covered the ground. And when you took out an axe and
started chopping a path through the trees, I began to get scared. It was the
kind of darkness where I couldn't be sure whether I had gone blind or not,
because when I closed my eyes it was still as dark. I clung on to your
unfamiliar shirt. As you led me deeper into the forest, the second thing you
said to me was "Your parents always wanted to protect you, even if they
couldn't do it themselves."
You brought me to a house in the middle of the forest, built out of the same
ancient wood as the trees. The kitchen of that house was painted yellow, and
you switched on all the lights so that the darkness didn't seem like it was
closing in. You taught me how to make pancakes fluffier than any my
grandmother had ever cooked. The third thing you said to me was, "You're
safe." And I started to feel better, my stomach warm and full and my dusty
formal shoes off my feet.
I was eight then, and you brought me up in that house, teaching me how to
read and write and do sums. And I'd try to climb the trees outside the house
to see the sky, but the trees were too tall and it just left me with fistfuls of
splinters. You taught me how to use the axe so that I could clear my own

path through the forest. Sometimes I thought about the world outside the
forest, mostly just about my parents, drifting amongst the burning stars of
space.
And the earth kept turning, inexorably, on its axis, and years passed. The
forest grew bigger, and more tangled, and started to close in on the clearing.
At night as the wind blew, the trees would bend and their branches would
slap against the windows. You made it my duty to use the axe and clear a
path through the forest each day, widening the circle around us. But the
trees kept growing back, taller and stronger and ancient.
One day I came back from chopping firewood and found you lying face down
on the kitchen floor, branches pushing through the cracks in the door. That
was when I realised I had to leave the forest, because you were gone. I took
a light and the axe and the keys to the rusty car that you hadn't used for
years, because the jingling reminded me of you. Before I left, I looked
through the drawers next to your bed, the ones you always kept all the
important things in. I found a box made of black plastic that absorbed the
light as you turned it, like those sunglasses that hide people's eyes. It had
one button on the side, and a note from you: this had been what my parents
left me. I took that too.
I chopped my way out of the forest and tried to learn how to live outside of it.
I got a job pumping petrol at a gas station where they didn't ask who I was or
where I had come from. And every day I watched the dust motes spiral
through the air as I waited for the next customer to drive through, and
wondered if this was what I wanted to do with my life. My birthday had been
on the same day as yours, and we'd celebrate it together. You'd bake a cake
and I'd help crack the eggs into the mixing bowl. Now I spent every birthday
alone. Maybe there was something wrong about me, from having grown up in
the forest's darkness, but people avoided me.
Sometimes I'd look up at the stars, and think about my parents, and about
how they had always left me to someone else to be taken care of. Floating all
the way up there, orbiting the earth. The day when the newspaper printed a
special issue on the shuttle's anniversary, and I saw a picture of my parents
for the first time in years, I remembered the black box. I took it out and
pressed the button.
Static. And then the smell of exhaust fumes. I open my eyes and I'm in a
carpark, standing next to a sleek black car. Your old keys fit into the ignition,
and I begin to drive until I reach a churchyard and the sound of a military

band. At the verges of the grass, there's a little girl in a dusty black dress,
being ignored by the adults around her. So I pull up to the pavement and
beckon to you to get in. The first words I say to you are "Happiness is
something you have to make yourself."

To Market
(written for the theme A Necessary Space)
She sells fruits. This is what she has been doing for the last forty years. Every
morning while it is still dark, she unpacks the fruit from their Styrofoam
nests. Waxy-skinned, glossy red jambu. Ripe yellow mangos with smooth
curves that speak the promise of juice and sweetness. Cempedak, with their
thick, leathery husks, and rambutans, tangled and hairy, alongside the
delicate prettiness of easily bruised apples and pears. The bright spheres of
oranges. They are all here, all on display, at her stall, the world represented
in a dazzling tableau of fruits of all kinds, all sizes. She takes pride in her
little stall, telling customers where each fruit is imported from: The longan
ah, from Thailand. Very sweet, very nice, I let you try try some then you
decide. The bananas are from Malaysia, the dragonfruit from Vietnam. The
lights overhead cast bright fluorescent light on the faces of the customers,
making the shadows darker by contrast in the places the light cannot reach.
By now, her customers all know her. She saves special deals, the best and
the freshest, for her regulars. Everyday she is greeted by cries of Pagi, mak
cik! Apa khaba? shouted above the noise and the crowds, the heat and
constant motion of the market.
She takes one day off a week, on Mondays. Then she goes home to her tworoom flat, which she moved into when her children grew up. The flat is
simple, but it is just right for her, she says. In the evening when she comes
home from the market, she will take a shower then spend the remains of the
day in one way or another. Usually she switches on the television and lets its
sounds fill up the flat, the screen playing out different dramas, different

stories late into the night. Sometimes she falls asleep with it still on, and
curses the electricity wasted in the morning.
On some weekends, her son comes to visit. This is the son whose picture she
keeps in her pocket to show the regulars, the son she worried about through
all the various stages of his growing up as a baby, how little he ate, how
slowly he grew, and later, his average grades and lack of interest in school.
The other stallowners know all about her son and laugh goodheartedly
whenever she talks about him. Aiya, hell be okay one. Always like that.
When her son comes to visit, the customers shake their heads over how filial
he is, how tall and strong. Perhaps he does not know fruits like his mother
does, but he helps to carry the crates of fruits to the stall and letter the
cardboard signs. He has his mothers way with people, they say, seeing how
he banters with the people who come to buy, how the little children like to
chase him and pull at his shirt. When he goes back to work at his office the
next day, she is sad but does not show it. The little children ask where
gorgor has gone, and she tells them and herself that he will be back the next
week. She goes back to her two-room flat and switches on the television, and
in the early morning the next day she goes back to her stall and lays out the
days fruits. There is always something practical to do, something routine
and necessary that she will handle. Oranges and pears, lychees and
papayas. These apples are all the way from China. She has been selling fruits
for forty years, and now she is sixty-three.
But today she is not smiling. The fruits are laid out, the crates unpacked, but
she is not smiling, there is no contentment on her face at the sight of her
stall. She pushes herself through the details of the daily routine. These are
the cloths to wipe the surfaces down. She runs through the inventory list,
written in her rudimentary, scratchy handwriting, the little written Malay she
learnt in her three years of education. Across the aisle, the fish man is
shouting the bargain of the day: Six, six, six! Stingray six dollars only, very
cheap! She shuts her eyes and weighs an apple in her hand. Its round mass,
which she feels against the rough pads of her fingers, is solid and real. As
she stands there, the stall owner from the row behind comes over. She is a
young woman, well-built, in her thirties; next to her, the fruit lady feels very
old.
Aunty, how are you ah? Today my son no school, so I bring him here. Her
son, wide-eyed and serious, hides behind her, but she coaxes him out,
admonishing him. Have you called aunty? She is neighbours with the fruit
lady both inside and outside the market, living in the same block as her.

When her children were younger, one of them had fallen sick, and she had
come to the fruit lady immediately, explaining that there was no one else she
could trust her oldest son with while his father was at work and as she
brought the youngest to wait through the long polyclinic queues. The fruit
lady had stood in the gate of her flat, looking at the state she was in, the
panic and the trust in her eyes. Of course she had said yes and brought the
boy inside. They had waited for many hours for his mother to come back,
sitting beside each other in the small room. She had dressed the boy in her
sons old clothes and fed him biscuits and water as he sat on the plastic
stool, swinging his legs. She flipped the television to a childrens channel and
they watched the cartoons in silence. When his mother came back, the infant
no longer tossing and feverish, he had slipped around the fruit lady and
strapped on his sandals, ready to go home as his mother thanked her, over
and over, for being so kind. The fruit lady did not feel kind. She had done it
because they were neighbours, because there was a need that she could fill.
Even now, watching the boy, she feels this is why he does not like her, why
he shies away with furtive movements. She pulls a banana off a ripened
bunch and offers it to him, but he refuses to take it until his mother, clucking
at his timidity, pushes it into his hands. You always so kind to us, mak cik.
So, hows your boy? How come I never see him around these few weeks?
The fruit lady turns away, looking at the cardboard signs, her sons letters in
marker ink.
Fine lah, hes fine. She wants the conversation to be over. The earliest of
the morning customers are beginning to arrive, and the young woman pulls
her son back to her stall. The fruit lady counts the fruits even though she
knows they are all accounted for, balances their costs again in her head. She
does not like the glare of the lights, the way they make every thing so bright
and sharp-edged. Outside of the market, away from the fluorescent lighting,
the sun is slowly coming up, and people are waking up, she thinks. They are
waking up to the warmth of a new day. A customer comes and she snaps
back to attention, starting to call out the prices of her fruit, offering deals
and bargains to whoever will hear her. No one comes near except a fruit fly,
which she hurriedly shoos away. But it is early morning yet and they will
come, she tells herself. She turns to see whether the stall next to her is doing
any better, but the man sitting out front has a sour look on his face, and his
wife in the back is bustling about the fruit, washing and rewashing it. She
notes with satisfaction that her selection is still better, that they pose no
competition to her stall which is one of the oldest. She feels like striking up a
conversation with the man, just to pass the time, but the mood that he is in

discourages her. And, she realizes after the thought, she does not want any
more questions about her son today.
The fruit lady goes back to work, calling out with renewed vigor, brasher and
more upbeat, more desperate as the crowd spills on and on, passing by her,
moving on to other stalls, sampling their produce, purchasing them with
satisfied nods. By eight thirty, she does not know what to do. She tells
herself it is still early yet, but in her heart she knows it is late, it has been
hours since the market started and the only thing that has moved from her
stall was that single banana. For the first time in years, she leaves the stall
for no reason, edging around the self-absorbed shoppers in her old flip-flops.
Making her way through the crowd, she goes a row down to her neighbours
stall. But her neighbour is busy, leaning across the table and haggling with a
customer. Her little boy is sitting in the chair behind the stall, somehow
having fallen asleep in the middle of the morning. The banana lies there,
uneaten, on the small table beside him.
She goes back to the stall, where nothing has changed during her absence.
Her throat is sore. A single droplet of sweat trickles down the side of her
face, where it drips onto the floor. The crowds are thinning, but still they
move on and on. She goes and checks her fruit once more, trying to see if
there is some fatal flaw, some defect that has turned people away, but there
is none. In the end, she just sits there. From her pocket, she takes out the
photograph of her son and looks at it for a moment, before putting it away.
She cannot bear this.
She tries to think of a day when she did not live for the business. A day not
filled with the bustle of the market, or an evening not filled with the
televisions drone. She has been a good neighbour, a good mother. Yes,
thats exactly what she has been. She rises to her feet, croaks out to anyone
who will listen, My son my boy, he- but the words are lost in the swirling
din.
All of a sudden, the lights are all gone, and the crowd has disappeared. Is it
so late?, she thinks to herself. Completely disoriented, she stumbles out from
her stall into the empty aisles. The people are gone, but the fruit still
remains, piled high in the deserted stalls, a dizzying display of plenty. For the
first time, the market is quiet. She walks, shuffling and stooped, to the stall
in the row behind, where she goes behind the counter and folds herself into
the chair. Saya seorang emak yang baik, baik, she thinks. I am a good
mother. Is that all she has been? On the table next to her, she notices the

banana where the little boy has left it, and she realizes that in all her years of
selling fruit, she has never eaten a single fruit from her own stall. So she
takes it and peels it slowly, the skin pulling away under her careful fingers,
and eats it bite by bite. The fruit is just as sweet as she promises her
customers. Then, peel held between thumb and index finger, she walks back
to her stall, where the fruits still wait for her. Apples and pears, with their
thin, delicate skins. Jambu, waxy-skinned, and rough cempedak. Rambutans
and lychees and even strawberries.
She will have to start living for herself, she realizes. She puts the peel in her
pocket, next to the photograph, and breathes in deeply, listening to the
unfamiliar silence of the market. The air moves through her lungs invisibly,
flowing through the lungs that are hers and no ones but hers, and she feels
her lungs expand, her ribcage lift as the air fills her lungs and makes her old
heart feel like soaring, air which makes her feel like she is being filled up with
the force that can let her continue, air which pushes open something inside
her and fills her with a necessary space. A space for her to stand there and
quietly breathe.

Beeswax for Sirensong

Sometimes, it feels as if the bomb in my head is real. This is what I tell
myself:
I am the girl with 26 components of a nuclear bomb in my head, waiting to
explode, as I hurtle through the city at the speed of light. I can feel the
atoms nuclei dividing under my skin, prickling like needles. And I feel like I
can wipe the pavements snowy white with a brush of my fingertips. I can
blow apart everything that this city contains, buildings full of people with
their heads full of dreams, with a nod. The city shines on, on, on, through the
night, ugly and throbbing with the force of twenty million people trying to
live their lives.
When I think about this, I clench my fists tightly, pushing away the shadowy
shapes of warheads and tailfins from my mind. It takes effort to repress the
beauty of smoke curling up from a bomb-crater, signalling a new start to the
sky.
I started this escape months ago. Every day, I drive further and further,
mainly after dark, when the car is wrapped in a cocoon of light. The machine
nestles quietly in the backseat, hidden under a blanket. Now and again, I
stop to brush the dust off its glass dome and check that the connections are
secure. Its still working.
The machine allows me to exchange memories with people. What I use it for
is to slowly get rid of the information I remember about the bomb. I just need
to persuade someone to give up a memory for mine.
And of course, the memories they give me are always the ones they want to
forget. The memories of the ugliest, most painful moments of their lives.
The other day the streetlights had already flickered on and I hadn't found
anyone to make an exchange. So I ran through the maze of anonymous
streets, cables trailing from my arms. I ripped down three wanted posters of
myself, sodden from the earlier rain. These I stuffed, still dripping, into a
mailbox as I ran past.
Then I rounded the corner and found myself in a park, the moon shining
bright and full above me, and to my surprise Id forgotten it was mid-autumn.

The park was filled with children holding lanterns. Some of the children were
using sparklers to draw looping designs in the dark as their parents watched
them, smilling and proud. Over at the side, there was a little girl in a white
dress and an electronic lantern that played a tinny tune. Across the
playground, through the lonely swingsets and seesaws, I could see her
parents. They were distracted, looking at the moon.
So I bend down in desperation before her. Her dark eyes track me
suspiciously. "Do you want to know what this machine is for, kid?" I whisper.
"It's a machine that can take away your bad dreams, your nightmares. You
can try it.
She stays silent. Over and over, her lantern repeats its insistent tune.
"Listen, all it takes is a little prick on your arm. I hold up the machines
syringe-arm, talking slowly, persuasively. "Then I can take your bad
memories away, and in exchange, I'll give you some of mine. Its just like an
ant's bite." I reach out to hold her chubby arm, but she snatches it away.
"Mama said, dont talk to strangers." She fiddles with the lanterns handle,
twisting and untwisting the strings. A pause. She looks over to her parents
then up at me. "What kind of memories do you have?"
"They aren't bad, dont worry. Some things that the government doesnt
want me to know. I keep my voice steady, one eye on her parents. Its fine
for you to have them, youre just a kid.
"I don't have any bad memories." She had drifted over the machine, stroking
its shiny surface. I pull her hand away, gently. "That's okay. Look, it's easy. I
lead her towards a bench at the playgrounds far side, out of her parents
sight. Her shoulderblades shift underneath her skin, fragile and birdlike.
The memory she gave me was of her parents earlier that evening telling her
not to touch the red hot tip of a sparkler after it had gone out. She had
anyway, when they werent looking. So she gave me the feeling of being
burnt, of the sharp pain right before she took her hand away. A childs
memory, short and sweet.
I give her the instructions for assembling part eleven of the bomb and feel
the knowledge flow away forever.

For a moment, I feel almost at peace. The darkness behind my eyes laps
against my closed eyelids like the waves of a distant ocean as I breathe in,
breathe out, the girls small hand still resting gently in mine. I can feel the
cool evening air on my forehead and in the distance, there are the sounds of
children playing. I suddenly wonder if I could live here. Change my name and
hide the machine, get a real job and settle down. Maybe Id have a family
one day, and a daughter I could bring to the playground after dark. We could
light sparklers together, and Id tell her about the rabbit on the moon.
Then Im spiralling upwards out of that calm and into the sound of a police
siren, coming closer and closer to the bench, and the panic rises in my
stomach dizzily and the voice in my head is screaming at me, over and over,
get rid of the girl, get rid of her, get rid of the evidence before they take you
away.
I punch her, hard. She falls limply, blood and snot spilling out of her broken
nose. Her head hits the pavement and I kick her in the ribs. I hear something
crack, so I kick her again until her chest caves in.
This is when the rain starts pouring down, torrentially, soaking my clothes,
blurring my vision. I can hear the sirens wail about a block away.
I dump the body in the canal by the road.
As she disappears beneath the water, the police car comes roaring around
the last bend, and Im trapped in the glare of the headlights. Slowly,
resignedly, I raise my hands above my head. A dark trickle of blood runs
from thumb to wrist, and this is what I focus on as I wait for them to take me
away.
But the car continues on past me, past the machine, splashing me with a
curtain of rainwater as it speeds on.
***
Sometimes I wish the bomb in my head was real. Then Id close my eyes and
will everything to go away, for a mushroom cloud to rise up and envelope me
gently as a breeze. Instead, all I have is the raindrops patterning the
windows as I drive on and on, and the machines invisible presence in the
back seat, and a memory of my hand reaching out to touch something I was
told not to. Of getting burned.