3:29 - Chapter I

I imagined when my heart stopped for three minutes and twenty-nine seconds last year, I had died. But then I came back thanks to a strong cocktail of electric shocks and adrenaline injections and a rather loud litany of, “Live, live, live, live, live!”

That had been the surgeon, by the way, who was an emotional creature. Perhaps he said that to every patient that died on his operating table as part of his gimmick, but it had done the trick in my case. I had returned, my heart was pumping blood again and my brain began reversing its shut down process.

When I came to a couple of weeks later, I realized I had lost few things (mainly the sight and hearing on my left eye and ear) and gained a couple of other things as compensation. The old folks might now call me ‘touched’. Or ‘cursed’. My mom still called me lazy and I was forever ‘Delusional Wombat’ to my dad.   

Losing the sight in my left eye was hard to take and the loss put unnecessary strain on my right eye, so I wasn’t allowed to look at computers or LED screens for too long. That meant no smartphones that could entice me into partaking in the forbidden activity and my time in front of the computer was regulated by an egg timer.

While everybody else talked with their thumbs and other digits, I had to rely on old-fashioned face-to-face speech and passing notes in the class to communicate. My parents also had the initiative of informing the school that I needed to sit at the very front of the class due to this newfound impediment. The school happily obliged.

When I died during those precious minutes, I did not see anything. No tunnel and no light at the end of that tunnel. No horned devils or a scene from hell. No people who had passed away coming back and giving me advice. No angels, not a feather. Not a thing.

But I heard music.

Housewife

Celebrating International Women's Day 2012. I read this article from The Atlantic and was filled with an urge to write. The resulting piece is as follows:

Housewife

I am a housewife, Sari said. I take care of my husband and children. I have three children. Two sons, she added after a pause, smiling.

Sari's husband was an employee of a state-owned oil corporation. They lived in a two-storey, three-bedroom house with a garage that could fit two cars. Their house was located in one of the suburban development projects outside the metropolitan and it was within easy reach of a hypermall and a wet-market. The children’s school was also close by, just fifteen minutes away. 

Look, Sari said, pointing at a photo of her children. This is Arif, the eldest. He’s in the third-grade now. And this is his brother, Arya, second grade. The little one is Alina, she’s only two. I’m enrolling her in a playgroup next year.

The Coop

They were sitting at Bu Ikawati’s roadside kiosk when the light from the single bulb above their heads went out. “Yaaah, there it goes again,” said one of the men. The others only nodded while sipping their black coffee and puffing cigarette smoke, as if saying it was to be expected.

The smell of kretek, tobacco blended with cloves, filled the air. It was a balmy, sweat-filled night that had been denied rain for weeks. Syarief wiped the back of his neck with his hands. The mosquitoes that had previously gathered around the lone bulb were now making him their target. He swatted them away, only to hit Mansyur and caused his coffee to spill. That earned him a glare, and although they were good friends no words were spoken. His tongue was as heavy as the apology that sat on it. He knew it was there but didn’t bother to let it out.

Conversations were often abandoned at a night like this. Nights where they knew with certainty that the next day would be worse. Still no rain. The rice fields were parched. The longer the drought ran, the longer the silence was. Syarief wondered how many weeks had it been since he’d last seen a hint of drizzle. The riverbed was now as dry as the asphalt road. The soil cracked, the carcasses of their livelihood hung, withered and defeated. They all needed to make do without a harvest this season and the men had been working all sorts of jobs just to survive. These jobs, like the rain, didn’t come easily. Many of his friends and neighbors had been forced to go to the capital Jakarta to scrape a living.

The Holly War

 It was with every intention of malice that Holly, Chigusa’s Holland Lop bunny, bit my ankle and wouldn’t let go. I told her as much, but that girlfriend of mine defended the dwarf rabbit and accused me of delusions and oversensitivity. “How can,” she began, “such a cute creature like Holly have that kind of thoughts? Look at her!”

I looked at the big floppy ears, large eyes and button nose.

“Even Satan was once considered devilishly handsome,” I reminded Chigusa and made an effort to look in pain.

The Umbrella Woman

The umbrella woman’s job is to take you from one point to the other without getting you wet in the rain. You pay her a pittance for this service. She always carries three umbrellas hooked on one arm and only appears when the sky looks ready to cry. More often than not, her presence foretells the rain. Whenever you see her lounging around the corner of your apartment building, you know that it’s time to bring the laundry in.

It is an easy job, but not a lot of people want to do it. The rain is the main reason why. It is a fickle deity—it teases, delivers, withholds, spends, and rages on, yet ultimately always stops. The rain is the friend and enemy. The rain provides and takes away. The rain pours for one day and ceases for two weeks. The rain keeps the umbrella woman alive while slowly killing her.

Besides, being an umbrella woman is not by choice.

The Body Painter

This particular entry was written for Writing in the City's October 2011 prompt. The theme was 'Transaction' -- how art suffers or thrives in this increasingly materialistic and transaction-based world, especially in Singapore. 

The Body Painter

Word count: 750

Summary: What do you get for three hundred dollars?

Liliflora

This piece is inspired by a fortuitous visit one day of a similar bird who showed nothing but polite indifference, and a bottle of talc powder sitting around in my room. 

Liliflora

Word count: 2400
Summary: In the language of flowers, magnolia means 'love of nature'. Who knew?

This morning a bird came to my window and spoke to me. “Beware of the Liliflora,” it said. Before I could ask the bird what it meant by the ominous warning, it had flown away.

I kept on replaying the scene in my mind few dozens times over the next two days, but I still couldn’t understand the bird’s words. I didn’t even know what Liliflora meant. When I searched the term on the internet, I only got entries on magnolias and the closest I’d ever been to the flower was through my talcum powder. Did this mean I have to be wary of talcum powder from now on?

1000Words - Scenes

 
Scenes—Jakarta / Singapore / Ubud

Word: 1000

Summary: Exercise in short forms. Caught-in-the-act, deer-in-the-headlight, I-saw-you-watching-me-watching-you moments. Snippets of memories. Thoughts. The good, the bad, and the fugly.

*

At the MRT, a middle-aged, silver-haired man wearing blue-striped polo shirt and grey pants walked passed by. He shouldered a backpack that had one side-pocket open. From inside of that pocket, a white girls underwear peeked through the slit.

fifteen

The only image that survived until the end of this writing was that of an empty hospital bed. This is romance in flash fiction. How many ways can you say "I Love You" without using those three words? Ah, the eternal struggle.

fifteen
Word count: 625
Summary: Fifteen ways he kissed her while the world stayed still.

The Long Winter

The Figment.com prompt is to write a short story based on a fairy tale. I decided to based it on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Nightingale".

The Long Winter
Word count: 1195
Summary: A woman who averts her eyes and a man who stares. This is their silent winter.

The Purge

The theme of this piece is "utopia" - a prompt from Figment.com. I don't believe that a perfect utopia is possible as long as humans are around, given our propensity to be narrow-minded.

The Purge

Word Count: 750

Summary: For those who dwell in heaven, all are perfect. All must be perfect. When they’re not, it’s time to fix things.

-Year 101-

It was a couple of days after the first centennial anniversary of Purgatorio and a rare shower, definitely not scheduled, occurred in the lush southern plains of New Petra. Hammurati was mending a torn skirt when she noticed the first splash of water hitting the windowsill and immediately abandoned the hapless project to watch serotonin-infused droplets evaporate as soon as they made contact with soil. Her mother called out, telling her to go outside and prepare the drums—just in case the light shower grew heavier. No sense in wasting free water, she said.

The girl obeyed and fetched the drums from the garden shed. She was putting the last empty barrel at the corner of their backyard when a sudden, loud, thunderous crack tore through the wide plains and for a moment the world turned as black as bruise. She didn’t remember if she’d screamed or if the noise had silenced her dumb, but rooted to the spot, Hammurati felt for the first time in her young life a paralyzing fear that took over her body. Then she saw him.

          

The djinn.

1000Words - Little Sins

Just because this piece has been sitting in my PC forever, and it needs to get out and get a life.

Little Sins

Word count: 1000

Note: I never had a conversation as remotely interesting as the one below.

She said to me one day, “He didn’t text back.”

Knowing perfectly well who ‘he’ was, I thought it was normal and within realm of possibilities. And I said so.

“No, he’s good at these things.”

What things?

“You know, like replying and stuff. Keeping in touch. Saying hi, how are you’s.”

Oh, making friends.

1000Words - The CD

A picture speaks a thousand words, they say. This is a project for me to write a thousand words about one, about anything really. Here's the first.

The CD

Word count:1000

Note: Inspired by Swinging Popsicle’s Transit.

Her favorite CD was from an obscure indie group consisting of three Japanese and an American. She bought it at an anime convention few years back, when dressing up as another character was still a part of her life, and it had accompanied her throughout the good years and the tough ones. There were twelve songs in the album: eleven were sung in Japanese and one in a crooked, yet recognizable English. She had those eleven translated and romanized so she could sing along.

(years later she would misplace the piece of paper and thus lost the meanings of the lyrics forever)

Need You Now

This happened on a perfect day. At the end of that perfect day, I wanted to scream. The next writing exercise is that scream in so many words. Words I can say to anybody without revealing any particular identity.

Title inspired by Lady Antebellum's hit "Need You Now". Played in loop.

Tabidachi (Starting a Journey)

Hello hello! Boy, am I glad to be here! It's the first writing exercise I've done after a long while. LJ still wins hands down in terms of formatting and publishing ease, although I haven't lost hope that after slogging in the HTML code long enough, this blog will finally take a decent shape.
 
Tabidachi - Starting a Journey
Summary: It all starts with a pickup line, even in the oddest kind of circumstance.

Note: The Yoshida Brothers' 2003 namesake album inspired this. Tabidachi is the first song.

The first thing that came to his mind when West stepped into the train car was how the stench of humans repulsed him so. Odors that came from stale aftershave, unwashed dried sweat, and just day-to-day mixture of musk and growing germs made him want to gag. He never had any difficulty with non-human waste, yet the thought, simply the thought of touching another human body was beyond his imagination. It was practicality — next train in ten minutes and just as aromatic as this one—that kept his feet moving deeper into the confine, searching for a solid, undisturbed space to stand during the thirty-minute ride. Preferably one where the air-conditioner blew through the vent in generous bursts. Preferably one least conspicuous where he could look up to the ceiling and swallow the air without incurring questions.