Ken Lye’s short plays have been performed in Singapore at The Substation and Drama Centre Black Box, and his short stories have appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and the upcoming Singapore at Home: Life Across Lines anthology. He completed his MA in Creative Writing in 2019, and is currently working on his first novel.

The Last Dance

Mabel purses her burgundy lips, sucking hard on the straw, though only ice cubes remain. If only she had not finished her second Long Island iced tea so quickly. Thirty-six years of marriage, and there Raymond is, gliding across the dancefloor of their favourite salsa club with another woman, their outstretched arms forming a perfect rectangle, while their feet jab and jive exuberantly to The Gipsy Kings’ “Djobi, Djoba.”

Other men in their sixties try to slow their decline with languid evening strolls, and unhurried breast-strokes up and down the pool, their manatee potbellies hanging underwater. Raymond, however, is thriving, every day either lifting weights at the community centre gym or conquering forty freestyle laps, each stroke a forceful thrust into the water, body flat and rigid as his grandson’s kickboard. From where she sits with their friends, Mabel can see the curve of thick muscle in his slightly flexed biceps, the canary yellow polo t-shirt straining across his broad chest, and the smooth crescent of his bum in the brown cotton trousers she bought him last week from Giordano.

Her hand, as wrinkly as crepe paper, falls to the small mound of soft flesh around her waist. Her girlfriends strip the fatty skin off the poultry on their husbands’ chicken rice (when they are allowed to have it at all). Mabel, however, feasts on beef steaks and pork chops with Raymond every Saturday evening when their three sons bring wives, boyfriend and children back from across Singapore to their apartment at Marine Parade. She only bought this sequinned silk dress a week ago, but already the garment feels chidingly snug. Perhaps less protein, more salad this weekend.

Raymond hooks one firm hand around the back of Mei Yun’s bare shoulders, and effortlessly guides his partner into a dip, her enviably slim body draped across his sturdy forearm, her neck exposed as if to receive a kiss or a vampire’s bite. His legs wide open in a victor’s stance, he holds the pose for a beat, then two, as if expecting wild applause. Mabel manages a polite smile.

Lily, pressing close against her, leans over on a wave of Chanel No 5, and brushes aside the mahogany curls embalmed in hairspray around Mabel’s right ear.

“You don’t mind if I ask him for the next dance, do you?”

“No, of course not,” Mabel replies. “He’s all yours.”

She continues to suck aggressively at the mangled straw. Lily, looking suspiciously reupholstered, swivels over to Serene on her other side, the two women’s bobbing heads close in jocund conversation, the rusty red rinse in their hair sparking in the undulating shower of disco lights. The three men at the end of the table are already on their third round of Carlsberg. She cannot quite hear what The Husbands are saying, no doubt more grumbling about some government policy or another, not that they would ever do anything about it except pontificate loudly in the company of other equally belligerent old men. (Did one of them really just say, “If I were Prime Minister…”?) Lily’s doctor husband, Patrick, is, as usual, holding court, gesticulating dramatically as if trying to win an argument by knocking his opponent over or poking him in the eye. They must be so relieved that they do not have to dance with their wives this evening. Just because they have been dragged to salsa classes by their better halves does not mean they have to like it. Or are any good at it. What men hate most, after all, is having to do anything in public that doesn’t allow them to show off.

She stabs at her phone with her index finger. She has only danced twice with Raymond tonight, the other three women taking turns as if her husband were a slice of black forest being passed back and forth. Is there time for another round? Maybe, but it is already eleven. She needs to be up at six for school, and still has a small stack of marking to power through before she can go to bed. Raymond, of course, will not even need to set his alarm. His latest job trying to sell insurance means he can wake up whenever he wants. How lovely.

Lily turns back to regale her with a meticulous account of her vacation to the French Alps: so cold my face couldn’t move. Mabel has to swallow back the obvious joke. Her eyes remain locked on Lily’s in the half-light, hands folded neatly on her lap as if posing for a Renaissance painting. Underneath their table, however, Mabel’s manicured feet, nails hard candy shells, tap-tap-tap restlessly on the linoleum flooring as the band starts up her favourite song.

Just ask one of the other men to dance, Raymond argues each time they fight on the drive home. They are our friends, they won’t be so rude as to say no. (Raymond certainly never does.) Mabel gives him the same reply every time: you’re a man, you won’t understand. She does not know what they taught at Raffles or Nanyang or any of those fancy schools that her friends went to, but she was raised a good convent girl.

Then again, Sister Dolores had never heard the call of Enrique Iglesias’ “Bailamos.”

An intake of breath, slow and deep, fills her lungs with courage. She turned sixty last week. What could be scarier than that? She surveys The Husbands. They huddle even closer together, closing ranks so she cannot easily pick one off. The last time she saw any of them on the dancefloor was an obligatory tango at a wedding anniversary, their faces in rigor mortis.

Of course, she should have foreseen her current predicament from the first group dance class. It’ll be such fun, Lily had promised. The Husbands, creased brows, crossed arms and sweaty armpits, knew better. Six months later, and the three men still occasionally crash into their partners, step on their toes, always managing at some point during the song to become entangled with their spouse in a cacophony of flailing limbs. Raymond, on the other hand, moves like a jungle cat. She feels safe with him leading, knowing he will support her whether she is turning in for a spin or leaning in for a dip. Their instructor was particularly impressed by how a man of his age and build would merrily shimmy his shoulders and wiggle his hips with such teenage abandon. Patrick raised an eyebrow once, and called him “flamboyant.” Please! Raymond was the captain of three sports teams in school, and always had the prettiest girls chasing after him. He has never had anything to prove. When their youngest son Philip, fresh out of Oxford on a government scholarship, sat his parents down at the family dining table, and told them he was gay, it was Mabel who sputtered and stuttered. Raymond, however, simply took Philip in his arms, saying, you are my son, and nothing will ever change that.

“Do you want to dance, Patrick?”

Of the three men, he has shown the most interest, occasionally initiating a dance with his wife without prompting, especially after a few drinks. She glances at the table top. She should have asked for another round before making her move, but how could she when she knows Patrick will pick up the tab as usual?

She is just about to tell him that it’s okay, she was just asking, when a nervous grin forms across Patrick’s face as if being carefully drawn by a child.

“Why not?” He looks like he has agreed to bungee jump off a cliff, equal measures excitement and fear.

Her enthusiasm deflates quickly. He is better than when she last saw him dance with Lily, a little less stiff. Still, he moves like he is checking off a list in his head, so she is hesitant about executing any elaborate moves. She studies his face to occupy the time instead. He is not unattractive. His face is weary and mottled with age, but decent and kind, with a hint of playfulness. An Indian Cliff Richard. It is sweet that he does not look directly at her: she is his best friend’s wife after all. As she feels the chunky strap of his Rolex watch against her waist, she thinks about how lucky Lily is, never having had to work. No late nights planning lessons and marking, no Saturdays taken up by Drama Club, remedial lessons, class camps. Thankfully, none of Mabel’s boys has taken after their father, whose past is one failed business venture after another, a ribbon of regrets. They all have good, steady jobs: two lawyers and a high-flying civil servant.

The songs ends, and she diplomatically mumbles something about having to work the next morning. As they navigate past other couples to get back to their table, she notices Raymond and Mei Yun returning as well.

“Don’t worry,” says Patrick, clapping Raymond on the back as he plops into his seat with a heavy whoosh, relieved to have come home to the sanctuary of other men. “You’re still the king.”

Mabel is about to tell her husband that it is time to go, when he stretches his hand out to her.

“Can I have the last dance?” he asks, desire in his eyes. No, not desire. A sort of pride.

He takes her by the wrist, and with a gentle but insistent tug, pulls her onto the floor, his left palm softly cradling her back. Then, with his right hand, he shoots her left arm straight up towards the ceiling, as if calling the band and all the other couples to attention. For a moment, it seems to her that the music has stopped, and everyone is frozen in place, waiting for his cue.

As she tilts her head up towards him, a swirl of lights catches Raymond across the face like he is having his photograph taken. He looks so young. She remembers their last holiday together. It was only to Malacca, only for a weekend. They sang along to all her favourite Teresa Teng albums on the three-hour drive (even though he is more of a Bee Gees kind of guy), and walked along the river that Saturday evening, hand in hand, secondary school sweethearts again. She remembers being sixteen (pigtails, pinafore, pimples), Mousey Mabel, quiet and grey, and how he had all these grand plans laid out. He was going to be the towkay of a big company, buy her a bungalow, a Mercedes, maybe one for each of them. She laughed, and said she would go to the Teachers Training College anyway. Just in case.

The music starts up again, releasing the other dancers from its spell. He pulls her close to him, almost lifting her off the ground. She closes her eyes, and breathes him in.

There is another world where he is everything he has ever hoped to be, and everything she has dreamed for him to be. This is not that world. But tonight, the most handsome man in the room has taken her in his arms. They will go home together after this last dance, and, without being asked to, Raymond will make her a bowl of instant noodles, and stay up reading the latest John Grisham novel beside her while she finishes grading test papers.

Jessie Raymundo teaches composition and literature at PAREF Southridge School. He is currently a graduate student at De La Salle University-Manila. His poetry has appeared in a few publications in print and online. He lives in a small city in the Philippines with his two cats.

Memory with Water

For now let’s talk about sinking

cities, said my mother

who carries a pair of Neptunes

in her eyes & paints about phantoms

in Philippine poetry. Gravity is when

the psychiatrist assessed you

& located a heart that is heavy

for no reason. In an instant, you were

in the sea: a merman sticking his head

above the surface, swathed in salt

water, standing by for austere arms,

like a remembrance possessed by echoes

of phantoms playing on a record player.

Almost always, there are greetings–

at sunrise, say hello to clouds, to roosters,

to the maps of music you made in your mind.

& when the morning arrived as a Roman

god of waters & seas, you finally crawled on land.

~

Gravity

I reread your letter & your voice

dives into my ears like shooting stars.

Words frozen, punctuation marks

like walls of a citadel.

The historic walled city where

you sketched me in a centuries-old

cathedral. I held the rosary we’d made

from old broadsheet newspapers.

The sweatier I got, the more

the beads around my wrist warped.

All statues without heartbeats

staring at you. All motionless,

rendered livelier by their staring.

More than three hundred summers ago,

Newton stared & witnessed

a heart fall out of the blue.

An aged brick, separated.

A bead detached. You’d never age

another year older. Everywhere, the devout

bending knees to the ground, saying prayers,

breathing without you. & I, too, living,

praying, motionless to adore the voice

the way I did the woman, spaces

like dust from space.

~

Bushes

Nights like these, we summon

a body, have it

abandon the wind-

down routine, the needed spindle

to prick the finger before the deep

sleep, how the curse is fulfilled:

dimming the lights, shutting the eyes

to omnipresent devices,

& if the mind begins to wander,

noticing it wandered. In front of your house,

our stomach rustling, filled

with the unseen, craving for eyes & ears.

Lola, you remember, has names

for these night noises: nuno, tianak,

sigbin. Fear not, it is just

us, the neighbors you have never

spoken with. How your fingers shiver

now, this moment with the woody stems

of your nightmares, our movements

synchronized under the spotlight

glare of the full moon.

Applause

The land I own is myself. I am dirt that became earth, and earth that became sky.

There are days when I am

so majestic, I am more spotlight than performer.

More magic than magician. And then there are days

when I wake up with my own blood in my mouth. When I am cancelled shows and empty auditoriums. When my only performance is the one-act play of getting out of bed.

On those days, I am the most epic of all superstars. On those days, I remind myself that every heartbeat

is an applause.

Yunqin Wang is a writer based in Shanghai / New York. She writes in English, Chinese, and occasionally Japanese. She has been an editor for The Poetry Society of New York. Currently, she lives in Shanghai, where she serves food at a beer bar and music at a livehouse.

Before the Ox Year Comes

Wrinkled by Manhattan air,

my orange reclines to the kitchen board

the way Ma saw me off back home.

As I walked further, her body drew smaller,

not made by the distance,

but age, fast like a blade,

without being taught,

I’ve mastered knifing the fruit.

To read in a full city the letter

you wrote in an empty house

would be cruelty. In New York,

the best park is the empty park.

What was I thinking then,

taping boxes, listing gadgets,

popping cetirizine in between,

cardboards of lives unassembled

in the slant-ceilinged loft. Two hundred

people bid for my bad vacuum.

I was giving everything a price,

parts after parts of me to nonchalant hands.

I think tomorrow, it will be the Year of the Ox.

Things still live in Chinatown:

winds, bricks, moxibustion.

Cargos swallowed up in a squall.

Gazes of satellites. Things

you can’t walk away from. Then things

that are no good on a New Year’s Eve:

you take out the trash, smashing glasses,

going to a barber. All those superstitions

assuring you how easily a good

life slips away. In the old cassette,

I recited Li Po, with a lisp, skipping lines,

I was imitating Peking operas in my raw throat,

Su San in exile, drunken concubine, and Ma

kept saying yes, yes… As long

as I kept going, she was happy.

“Once shrouded, the earth

was bitten open by a Rat. ”

This I was told by a zodiac book,

and I’m a Rat child. I think of the twelve years

traveling vessels, race-walking

in the backstreets of borrowed lights,

plucking footsteps, piling toy pistols

and foreign postals, so as to walk

on every rope on the dock of the bay.

To find the right ship. I’ve watched

gangplanks yawn and close. Mudlarks

holding onto a jade tile, and this time,

I might soon be home.

The h-mart receipts slipped

out of my basket of American dreams.

Conversations at the B7 gate. You wrote me

a recipe on this side of the continent where

the final ingredient has long been extinct. Leaves

stuck to your presbyopic glass. This first Shanghai rain.

And your letter, all safe, all sound.

(2020 NY – 2021 SH)

Yunqin Wang is a writer based in Shanghai / New York. She writes in English, Chinese, and occasionally Japanese. She has been an editor for The Poetry Society of New York. Currently, she lives in Shanghai, where she serves food at a beer bar and music at a livehouse.

The First Dream

On the cold hospital bed, a baby’s heart

beat like a sheet of flame. Something small

and strong in an aseptic room. She arrived

on a clear Sunday morning, where jazz

is played down at the Jing’an Temple,

men lounging in bed, watching their wives

collecting mail. She arrived with an announcement,

silent like a leaf. When the doctor handed her

the first towel, it was by instinct that she knew

it had nothing to do with the crying, but a prize

for her safe landing. She learned scents.

Felt skins. Saw shapes and colors without

rushing to name, the world full of possibilities.

What came next was an earthquake. 1996

was such a peaceful year that the earth trembled

like a huge cradle. In a flash, she saw streets

reeling backwards. She heard music

in broken things, then fell asleep

like water in yet another tide.

It was the first dream of her life. And now,

20 years later, curling in the bathtub

in a shaking room in Seattle, the dream

suddenly comes alive and she realizes

whoever built the earth must have made a terrible mistake:

he must have reached for the sky to plant the first seed,

thus the world, made upside down.

The girl grew bigger each day. Along the road,

collected stones like counting clouds. Sang

to the wrens on poles ancient tales of how

they all once kinged the lands. It is with such a dream,

that the girl learned to wing, for the rest of her life,

on the earth’s vast apron.

David Tait’s poetry collections include Self-Portrait with The Happiness, which received an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and The AQI, which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize. His poems appear in Poetry Review, Magma, The Rialto and The Guardian. In 2017 he was Poet-in-Residence for The Wordsworth Trust. He lives in Shanghai and works as a teacher trainer.

The Snowline

I miss how the fields would give way to snow,

how it seemed decided between the world

and it’s watcher the exact moment

that whiteness would grow tangible.

Then fells, bright white and endless,

as if you could bow your head across the snowline

then raise it and be covered with a crown of frost,

fat icicles dangling from your beard.

I remember a farmhouse once straddling the middle

and felt jealous at the gift they’d been given,

a front door of spring and a garden of winter.

Whenever my heart walks through the snowline

I stop to listen to the whispering trees.

And I wonder if I’ll ever make it home.

~

At Tianchi Lake

There’s a small boat rowing out

from the North Korean border

and it’s the only surface movement on the lake,

too far off by far for us to hear it

the military base over there like a cabin

that can only be accessed by a slide.

The water changes turquoise in blotches

the lake a mirror of rolling clouds

and though our viewing platform teems

with crowds there’s silence, then the mist

climbs the mountain, creeps slowly towards us.

We stay for hours as it’s all we’re here for.

We stay through the rain and through the hail.

The mist comes and goes and with it the view.

We watch a hawk hunting song birds,

we watch a tour group unfurl a banner that says:

“The Number 1 Chongqing Battery Company”.

Mostly we watch vapour –

the way it climbs the far side of the mountain

then dips towards the lake, the way tendrils of mist

skirl down to the blue like souls reaching out

for the world, the shock of being taken away too soon,

of being pushed back out to the wild sky.

~

The Panorama Trick

He’s doing that trick again with his camera –

some picture of a landscape: where he’ll appear

on both the left and right sides of the picture

laughing at our mother, or pulling a face.

To us it was first rate magic, and almost incidental

were the landscapes between faces, pine forests in

Scandinavia, suspension bridges and monuments.

How does he move so fast? Does he have a twin?

The trick, like death, was to creep up behind her,

to settle in some blind spot and wait.

My mother’s hand slowly tracked the panorama

as he chuckled behind her. He’s doing it still,

but no longer emerging on the right-hand side. Our mother

keeps panning to the right, keeps waiting for him to appear.

Choo Yi Feng is currently an undergraduate majoring in life sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His short stories have been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Alluvium, the journal of Literary Shanghai, and Curios. His aspirations are divided between becoming a fiction writer and a marine biologist.

An Investor’s Guide to Abyssal Burial

Imagine with me what the experience of biological death might be like: a long sleep, an all-enveloping heaviness, a gentle and irreversible descent away from the world of light and into a mysterious, unknowable plane of darkness. The body grows cold, its metabolic processes slowing down. Skin becomes clammy, bloodless and prone to rupture. Soft tissue melts away, boundaries between body and earth blurred until even hard, mineral bone is chiselled and ground into dust.

<<I’m hungry. It’s like I haven’t eaten in months. Life is lightless, cold, and there is a weight crushing upon my body. There is always a weight crushing upon my body. I am drifting, an erratic tick coursing along my flesh every half-minute or so, in bold defiance of the void before me, scandalising it with my vulgar display of motion, of liveliness>>

For decades, marine science enthusiasts have been obsessed with whale falls: infrequent occurrences where the massive bodies of dead whales are devoured by the lightless abyss, collapsing upon the flat, grey expanse of the ocean floor with all the entropic force of a sub-nuclear missile. Blubbery flesh and decaying tissue is greedily exploited by an eclectic and charismatic community of bizarre sea creatures: chunks of flesh are first shorn away by giant sharks and monstrous deep-sea isopods. The residue hardly goes to waste, and is picked clean by an army of skeletal brittle stars, phantasmal octopuses and squat lobsters. Whale falls are able to support complex (yet transient) ecosystems anywhere from decades to even two centuries. They have been studied intensively as highly effective vessels for carbon sequestration, and their impacts on abyssal communities are well-documented.

<<The carcass calls out to me, its chemical trails of rot hitting me like a wall of heat, sending a liquid fire spreading through my limbs, my nerves stinging and ablaze. A blinding light tugs at a point just behind the soft palate of the roof of my mouth, producing an itch that cannot be scratched. This is what a magnet feels like when placed enticingly close, yet insufferably separate, to its opposite pole>>

Kyeong-Pane Pelagic Mortuary Services has been providing clients with the unique experience of abyssal burials for coming to twenty-five years now. With new footage from our remote deep-sea submersible, we show you the inner workings of a funerary practice that has become massively popular in the past few years.

<<I have reached a twenty-four-hour convenience store along a bygone alley down the middle of a city district where every other door is shuttered and everyone has fled, gone home. The lights are blinding, the cans and packets lining the aluminium shelves glossed in hyper-colour, screaming in glee. It is dark outside. There are shapes and shades that scare me. In here, I am free to eat air-flown Italian pesto with sun-dried cherry tomatoes. Semi-molten butterscotch brownies. Flash-fried Instant noodles with individually-sealed sachets of oil, seasoning, fried shallots and dark sauce>>

The first location our vessel will be visiting is the South Banda Basin in Indonesia, a country well-known for the rich coral reefs its archipelago hosts, and for many, a poignant symbol of the wonders of the underwater world. This burial ship bearing the legacies of eighty of our clients was sunken only eight months ago, and is still in the first phase of abyssal burial. Within hours of its touchdown upon the soft sediments of the vast, grey abyssal plain, a wealth of opportunistic predators emerged from the darkness, drawn by the scent trail of decomposing soft tissue. We documented twenty-two different species that were drawn to the burial ship within this period, including several bluntnose sixgill shark, a new record for the region.

<<I widen my jaws and sink my teeth in, spasming and writhing with my last reserves of strength in order to separate clods of soft tissue and twangy sinew from tasteless bone. The first bite, the first swallow does nothing to fill the emptiness within. I circle around, diving in for another, hurling myself into the orgy of bodies dead and living. In the hazy confusion, the pesto jar spills and is mixed with the golden butterscotch core of the chocolate pastries. A flurry of flavours—tangy, sharp, sickly sweet, greasy, gooey, crumbly, juicy, woody—assaults me. Ruinous flesh for ruinous beings. They slide along my guy, spreading their half-digested richness to fill out the contours of my being over and over. As I consume flesh, it consumes me>>

Moving now to our colleagues further north, we encounter a burial ship sunken eight years ago near the Meiyo-Daisan Seamount in the Sea of Japan. By now, most of the soft tissue has been devoured, and even fine particles of organic matter carefully combed and scavenged by smaller creatures such as spider crabs and octopuses. Osedax bone worms now colonise the hard skeleton that is remaining, boring into the vestigial osseous structures and beginning the process of converting this last trace of a body into ocean dust. Our burial ship here is so densely matted with the sinuous forms of bone worms that from afar, the skulls and femurs take on a fuzzy appearance. One notable tenant of the Meiyo-Daisan burial ship is the legacy of Mr Ryuji Tsugoda, who headed the Tsugoda multinational tech firm during his brief, yet productive twenty-nine-year reign. Mr Ryuji was one of the first individuals to publicly endorse and promote abyssal burials, and thus a key contributing figure to the massive popularity that Kyeong-Pane enjoys today.

<<The shelves were picked clean lifetimes ago, and yet everyone remained—persisting in the light, in the comfort of a twenty-four-hour convenience store on the ocean floor. Now we comb the containers that rise out of the ground, that branch and bifurcate. They grow steel arms and legs but have no heads. They are vending machines arrayed with dozens of slots, mostly empty, but some hosting the occasional prize. Chocolate rounds with peanut butter filling. Alaskan king crab, offered by the leg. Disposable panties. We sift, climb, parse, forage, salvage, disassemble, gather. This place is chronically understocked. Each generation reckons with the possibility that it will be the last, until generations bleed into one another, and precarity and finality become perennial>>

Research and monitoring remain our top priorities. We are constantly planning prospective studies and follow-ups to existing burials in order to verify and substantiate claims of carbon sequestration and to ensure that our projects are truly zero-energy and zero-waste.

<<The first flakes brush lightly against the crown of my cilia as they make their ethereal decent downwards, and it is a while before I recognise the taste of snow. The lights will grow stronger again now, after burning for so long. A storm of fairy dust descends with all the entropic force of a comet. I feel the paper-thin veneer of my shell begin to tremble and rupture with the glee of possibilities>>

We want to know how the legacies of our clients continue to nourish and enrich the abyss, whether it be on a timeline of eight months, eight years or eight decades. One current development that my colleagues are working on is a periodic re-infusion of human-derived nutrients into existing burial sites to facilitate complex, multi-layered successional eco-scapes. The possibilities, like the endless benthos that we are mapping in ever-finer detail, are multiplying exponentially. At Kyeong-Pane, it is not just about what you are buying, but what you are buying into.