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)

Udang Goreng Mentega (Shrimp with Butter and Worcestershire Sauce)

I made something good today. This phrase doesn't come often, considering what a disaster I am in the kitchen. I have been an enemy of proper cooking for years, and this sort of clumsiness is so inborn it's hard to let go. Nevertheless, let me say it again. I made something good today.