She stepped further toward the edge to take in the beauty. She never saw the push coming.
This is for you, Ma, this will save your soul.
Yes, Eddie, you did it, you have cleansed her of her sins. Now she will be with Him, she is safe.
When she screamed, he began shouting along too: “Ma. I love you! I’m coming, Ma! I love you!” In a new pure world, they would be together. No unhappiness.
He closed his eyes and took a step forward. But then a bony hand grabbed him and pulled him back.
“Ah, boy!” he heard a stranger shout. “What happened? Did your mother fall in?”
Eddie began to cry.
Her funeral was held a few days later. It was a quiet ceremony. There was no body; it was never found.
When her new friends, the ones he hated, showed up, he sidled up next to them to hear what they were saying.
“Pity,” said one.
“Yes,” agreed another, “she was so in love and ready for her new life. What a waste.”
Love? In love? What were they saying? His mother in love?
“Yes,” whispered the first. “She told me about him a few months ago. Their first encounter made me blush! They made love in Fort Canning Park! She said she was a mess when she got home.”
The jolt of the bus stopping brought him back to the present. “Time to get off, Eddie,” Uncle Teo said. “I’m sorry.”
Eddie thanked him and walked out into the night breeze. The bus had dropped him off where he had started, by the Merdeka Bridge.
He pulled the thin jacket closer to his body, heading to his usual spot in a corner. When he closed his eyes, he knew he would see his mother, the jetty, her back, his hands. Slowly but surely the dreams would come; dreams filled with snakes. Some nights they would slither up his legs first — on others, they would simply coil around his stomach. Just before the bites, he would wake up screaming.
Kena Sai
by S.J. Rozan
Bukit Timah
On Monday afternoon the old man with the erhu was at the corner again.
In the soft shade of a tembusu he sat on a folding stool, the ancient battered instrument held upright. The knobby fingers of his left hand slid along the strings while his right arm worked the bow. A tight-stretched cobra skin fattened each long slow note before releasing it into the air.
Watching through sinuous heat shimmering up from the concrete, Ed was caught. Davey stopped also. He stared, let go of Ed’s hand, balanced for a moment on not-quite-steady toddler legs, then plopped down on the grass of the verge, never taking his eyes off the old man. Ed smiled and slid down against a mahogany tree. It would make no difference when they arrived at Ellen’s. They could stay here for now and drift on these melodies, alien and alluring.
The old man’s hands gained speed, racing, nimble as the macaques in the park; then they slowed, slipped supple and flowing, like the water in the Strait. The macaques had ruled the island once, dancing through the trees, screaming by the water holes. The Strait had washed the shores of island and mainland, tying them together as it held them apart. Now the few macaques left were confined to the reserve and the Strait was causewayed and ferried, narrowed by landfill and curbed by barriers. But the monkeys were still monkeys and the water was still water.
The music sounded sad to Ed. That was the minor scale, he knew. Probably these were not sad songs, just his Western ears that made them so. The old man did look sad, though. Because he was far from home? Or because he was old? Or because no one but Ed and Davey stopped to listen, and he knew Ed didn’t understand?
No one in Singapore stopped to listen, or stopped for anything. No one played music on streetcorners, either, and on a less out-of-the-way sidewalk the old man would’ve been arrested for interfering with the public progress, for distracting citizens from their daily rounds, for being unnecessary. But on this hot afternoon in Bukit Timah, no one other than Ed and Davey were on the street to be distracted.
Ed wondered if the old man lived here, in this sweet, treed expat enclave where Westerners dwelled to be reminded of home. He doubted he did, thought it more likely he traveled to this corner by bus, to other corners of the island also, other quiet empty suburbs where he could sit and play his quavering melodies in the damp heat. Maybe he lived with his family; maybe his daughter was a banker, his son-in-law a doctor, his grandchildren energetic high-achievers who ran off in their school uniforms in the morning, none of them with time for the old man’s music or his memories. Maybe, long ago, young and energetic himself, he’d come to Singapore from South China, from heat like this, and now he was old and an expat and he, too, wanted to be reminded of home.
Ed didn’t. Home was worlds, years, lives away. He didn’t miss it and he didn’t want to go back there, back to New York, back to winter slush and politics he had to pay attention to and buses that didn’t come. It was ten years since they’d left, since Ellen had called, so excited, the promotion had come through and they were headed to London. No more taxi drivers who didn’t know the way, no more slithery roaches, pretentious hipsters, brown smothering clouds drifting over from New Jersey.
“I think they have roaches,” Ed smiled, kissing her at the door that night. Her eyes had been glowing. “And I’m sure they have hipsters.”
“My God, what smells so great in here?”
“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I thought I should learn the exotic cuisine.”
All through dinner she talked, making lists, assigning tasks. She would tackle this and Ed should follow through on that. He sipped his wine, enjoying her incandescence, her mad caroming. A month later they’d settled into a West London flat. “You’ve got to call it a flat now, darling,” she told him as she breezed out the door her first day.
Ed’s own clients were people he’d never met and they didn’t care where he was as long as their websites got designed, updated, and populated, a word that delighted him: as though each page were a tiny village, JoeJones.com, pop. 313. He methodically took care of them and then took long midday walks, as he had in New York, as he always had.
In their new suburban London home Ed saw himself as one of the islands revealed when the tide of commuters swept out each morning. His walks took him to the greengrocer, the locksmith, the fishmonger, islands also, each one craggy or forbidding or gentle, each one worth exploring. The cars driving on the left-hand side of the road he found interesting to watch, like choreographed dancers in a number new to him. He wondered whether England had no tornados because her traffic went counter-clockwise. He learned to differentiate the subtle variations of fog and rain and he liked the clinks when he jingled the coins that made his pockets heavy.
Ellen didn’t. The money exasperated her and she couldn’t get used to traffic coming from the wrong direction. The gray weather was draining. The cabbies never got lost but there weren’t many places, she found, that she wanted to go.
“New York made such sense,” she sighed over lamb chops and green beans one night. The chops were particularly good; Ed had made friends with the butcher, a fat man from Sussex. I’ve given ye the best ones, tender and tasty if ye cook ’em right.
“London,” Ellen went on, shaking her head. “It’s so... medieval.” Her response was to buckle down and work harder. Eighteen months later she called home one morning, an hour after she got to work, thrilled once again: they were going to Prague.