ISSUE 0
Edited by Elizabeth Deng, Han Wei Tian, Zack Soh, and Sherilyn Chew
PROSEThe Fox
by Sherilyn Chew |
POETRYMusings About The Abstract Nonsensical Of The World At Large
by Elizabeth Deng |
Sic Itur Ad Astra
by Clara Yeo |
How To Sell Your Heart
by Zack Soh |
PROSE
The Fox
|
|
(Expanded from the version published in the Creative Arts Mentorship Programme book “Eye on the World — Paradoxes of Life”)
My brother Geoffrey was a big fan of Nature magazines. He liked to read about the big freeze of ’88 and show me pictures of the frost hanging off tree boughs. Or he would show me the poppy fields in Afghanistan, blooming pink and purple in a sea of hazy green mist, stooped figures of women looming like distant clouds.
Once he showed me something in a National Geographic magazine. At first I only saw a sheet of ice. But then I discerned a flash of red, and looking closer, I saw that a little fox had been frozen solid beneath the surface. I drew back in horror, but Geoffrey laughed at my reaction.
“Relax, it's not going to hurt you,” He chided. “It must have been chasing a fish or something when the ice broke. Poor little guy.” He lingered over the page for a moment more.
I couldn’t get the image of that poor fox out of my head. The cold, the fear, the agony of his little paws moving through a frozen mass of water, till he could no longer feel his joints and till he slowly, numbly succumbed to the frost. It made me shudder to think of all that wild beauty trapped forever.
But the summer was long and the days tiring, and I soon lost myself in playing with Geoffrey. My parents were fairly well-to-do and they’d bought a cottage in a mountainside community, where we stayed for most of our teenage years. Every day we would go out and play on the rough green grass, poking through melting layers of snow.
Geoffrey was insanely fun to be around. He had these wide blue eyes that were constantly lit up with some fresh mischief. His exploits included tobogganing in a loose cardboard box or getting into fights with boys from up the road. He’d usually come home with his shirt torn, lip split, nose running, devilish grin intact.
It drove my mother crazy, constantly having to pick up after him. She’d always sigh and tell him off for being a bad influence on his little brother. To which Geoffrey would reply that I didn’t mind one bit - and it was true, I didn’t. In my eyes, my brother was a Lost Boy - one of the few daredevil explorers who could do anything in this world that he put his mind to. He was wildly popular in school too, though he’d always dismissed all the girls.
We loved to go to the lake, which froze over completely in winter. When we were alone there, in our own world, I would see a side of Geoffrey that most people hadn’t. He would gently cup a tender bud in his rough palm and introduce it to me by name. “Here, this one is a daffodil. Just look at that colour.” or “Those over there are bluebells.” He knew the leaves of all the plants too - the firs and the evergreens and the pines. He always told me their names as though it were a big secret, just between us.
Being Geoffrey’s brother, I enjoyed a pretty high status in school myself. My classmates always referred to me as “Geoff’s brother”, with a faint degree of awe. It made me feel a little superior. I always felt safe knowing that anyone who dared lay a finger on me would have to deal with the wrath of my brother.
But one week that all came crashing down. When I walked into class, everyone looked at me and started giggling. When I got to my seat the girl next to me shifted away perceptibly. I glanced at her in even more confusion and she hissed at me, “Are you a pansy like your brother?”
Then two boys behind me simultaneously threw their erasers at my head and shouted “Freak!”
That day, Geoffrey came home from school stiff-lipped and trembling, bruised all over. I ran after him, yelling his name, but he just hunched up his shoulders and ignored me. Eventually I caught up to him at the woodshed and tugged at his arm. “What’s going on? What happened to you? I’ve been hearing all sorts of stuff.” I demanded. My brother had never ignored me this way before.
Geoffrey shook his head slowly. Suddenly he fell on his knees and crawled into a corner of the dark, dank, cobwebbed shed. Then he started to cry.
I had no idea what to do. I’d never seen my brother cry. So often it was the other way round, him patting my shoulder or threatening to beat up the bully in my class who gave me a shiner. This time I just put my arm around my brother as he cried and cried. The only time he paused was to instruct me through muffled sobs, “Don’t tell Mom or Dad.”
Gradually it emerged that he’d run into some bullies at the lake, and they’d ganged up on him, yelling “Pansy! Homo! We know what you’ve been up to at school with that new guy, don’t run away from it!” One of them had caught up to him and tripped him. Geoffrey clammed up.
I stared at him in disbelief. “No way you’re any of that! You’re better than all of them put together.”
Geoffrey looked at me imploringly. “Would you still think the same if I told you it was true?”
I stared blankly at him. I didn’t know what to say. I’d read about this sort of thing but never been confronted with it. Not my brother.
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed.
True to my word, I never told our parents about what Geoffrey had said. He was smart though; he dismissed all the claims as utter rubbish, and started dating a popular girl. The bullies soon found another target. So things went back to normal. We never talked about what happened again. We carried on with our lives as per usual, memories of that day left far behind us.
That last year before he was due to attend university, we went down to the lakeside one more time. The winter ice stretched to the end of the horizon, where the treetops chafed the bleeding gash of the sky.
“This is the place they were playing,” Geoffrey said, pointing. “And then they chased me through this path, deep into that woody area.”
He’d broken our unspoken truce not to broach the subject. But I turned and hugged him. “I still think you’re worth more than the whole lot of them.”
His eyes glinted with the old mischief that had gotten us into trouble so many times. Then he whispered conspiratorially “Let’s go skating!”
“That ice doesn’t look thick enough,” I protested. “Mom would kill us.”
“Oh come on. Please?”
We laced up our skates and stepped gingerly onto the ice. At least I did. Geoffrey raced off, yodelling, as though his skates could slice through all the memories that haunted him.
Halfway out, as he was about to turn and come racing back to me, he suddenly stopped right in the centre of the lake, and turned dead silent.
I saw the long line left by his skates, stretching away from me to where the ice was most fragile. I realised in sudden horror that if he shifted his weight the ice would crack, and he would fall through into the freezing water.
In all the time I took to process this, Geoffrey stretched out his hand towards me imploringly, fear freezing his blue eyes. “Hey man,” He choked, as the cracking ice shifted beneath his feet - “I don’t want to die.”
“You are not going to die!” I could barely get my thick gloves off in order to grab my phone; I was trying to use my teeth but fear and cold was making them chatter too much.
“If you try to save me I’ll drag you in. Get back!” He shouted as the groaning ice forced me helplessly to retreat.
Shivering, he wiped his hand across his nose. My giant of a brother was again reduced to the little boy I had hugged in the shed that day. I desperately thought of all the pictures from the Nature magazines he’d shown me, tried to pick out one that would calm him down.
“Remember that picture of those poppy fields?” I called.
He nodded.
“And those little ducks in that pond - those cute yellow fluffy things. The bluebells in spring. All that. You’re going to see it again, okay? You just have to relax.”
He nodded again, but the ice was cracking fast. A horrible thought was already pulsating through me; he was going to end up like that fox, embalmed beneath the ice.
Geoffrey held out his hand, a tightrope stretched across the chasm between us, where his dreams had been beaten out of him so long ago. I could not save him from his pain then; I could not save him now.
Then the ice around him crumbled and I heard a scream that I only realised was coming from my mouth as the water rushed up to meet him.
***
The ashes of the dead don’t blow away easily. They remain as a breath of wind, a voice in your ear, a noise in the night that makes you turn over and mumble “What do you want?”. I scrutinised all the pages of Geoffrey’s adventures - a little bee, an out-of-focus dandelion - hoping to find something to remind me closely of him.
The closest I ever came was that little red fox, trapped in a layer of ice, eyes wide open in terror. I instinctively ripped out the page and crushed it.
Before I left for university, I visited the lake alone. Looking out over the ice, I tried to imagine what Geoffrey would have been like if he hadn’t attempted that final act of confidence. I wondered if his eyes would have held that same cocky confidence, if his grin would have been wider or more lopsided. He might have been brave enough to tell our parents the truth about himself. Or he might have been showing his own children images of a little red fox, encased deep inside the ice, scrabbling to get free until his bones froze in stubborn defiance.
And looking out over that vast unforgiving expanse, I imagined that I could slip under the ice into the arms of my brother, all grown up.
My brother Geoffrey was a big fan of Nature magazines. He liked to read about the big freeze of ’88 and show me pictures of the frost hanging off tree boughs. Or he would show me the poppy fields in Afghanistan, blooming pink and purple in a sea of hazy green mist, stooped figures of women looming like distant clouds.
Once he showed me something in a National Geographic magazine. At first I only saw a sheet of ice. But then I discerned a flash of red, and looking closer, I saw that a little fox had been frozen solid beneath the surface. I drew back in horror, but Geoffrey laughed at my reaction.
“Relax, it's not going to hurt you,” He chided. “It must have been chasing a fish or something when the ice broke. Poor little guy.” He lingered over the page for a moment more.
I couldn’t get the image of that poor fox out of my head. The cold, the fear, the agony of his little paws moving through a frozen mass of water, till he could no longer feel his joints and till he slowly, numbly succumbed to the frost. It made me shudder to think of all that wild beauty trapped forever.
But the summer was long and the days tiring, and I soon lost myself in playing with Geoffrey. My parents were fairly well-to-do and they’d bought a cottage in a mountainside community, where we stayed for most of our teenage years. Every day we would go out and play on the rough green grass, poking through melting layers of snow.
Geoffrey was insanely fun to be around. He had these wide blue eyes that were constantly lit up with some fresh mischief. His exploits included tobogganing in a loose cardboard box or getting into fights with boys from up the road. He’d usually come home with his shirt torn, lip split, nose running, devilish grin intact.
It drove my mother crazy, constantly having to pick up after him. She’d always sigh and tell him off for being a bad influence on his little brother. To which Geoffrey would reply that I didn’t mind one bit - and it was true, I didn’t. In my eyes, my brother was a Lost Boy - one of the few daredevil explorers who could do anything in this world that he put his mind to. He was wildly popular in school too, though he’d always dismissed all the girls.
We loved to go to the lake, which froze over completely in winter. When we were alone there, in our own world, I would see a side of Geoffrey that most people hadn’t. He would gently cup a tender bud in his rough palm and introduce it to me by name. “Here, this one is a daffodil. Just look at that colour.” or “Those over there are bluebells.” He knew the leaves of all the plants too - the firs and the evergreens and the pines. He always told me their names as though it were a big secret, just between us.
Being Geoffrey’s brother, I enjoyed a pretty high status in school myself. My classmates always referred to me as “Geoff’s brother”, with a faint degree of awe. It made me feel a little superior. I always felt safe knowing that anyone who dared lay a finger on me would have to deal with the wrath of my brother.
But one week that all came crashing down. When I walked into class, everyone looked at me and started giggling. When I got to my seat the girl next to me shifted away perceptibly. I glanced at her in even more confusion and she hissed at me, “Are you a pansy like your brother?”
Then two boys behind me simultaneously threw their erasers at my head and shouted “Freak!”
That day, Geoffrey came home from school stiff-lipped and trembling, bruised all over. I ran after him, yelling his name, but he just hunched up his shoulders and ignored me. Eventually I caught up to him at the woodshed and tugged at his arm. “What’s going on? What happened to you? I’ve been hearing all sorts of stuff.” I demanded. My brother had never ignored me this way before.
Geoffrey shook his head slowly. Suddenly he fell on his knees and crawled into a corner of the dark, dank, cobwebbed shed. Then he started to cry.
I had no idea what to do. I’d never seen my brother cry. So often it was the other way round, him patting my shoulder or threatening to beat up the bully in my class who gave me a shiner. This time I just put my arm around my brother as he cried and cried. The only time he paused was to instruct me through muffled sobs, “Don’t tell Mom or Dad.”
Gradually it emerged that he’d run into some bullies at the lake, and they’d ganged up on him, yelling “Pansy! Homo! We know what you’ve been up to at school with that new guy, don’t run away from it!” One of them had caught up to him and tripped him. Geoffrey clammed up.
I stared at him in disbelief. “No way you’re any of that! You’re better than all of them put together.”
Geoffrey looked at me imploringly. “Would you still think the same if I told you it was true?”
I stared blankly at him. I didn’t know what to say. I’d read about this sort of thing but never been confronted with it. Not my brother.
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed.
True to my word, I never told our parents about what Geoffrey had said. He was smart though; he dismissed all the claims as utter rubbish, and started dating a popular girl. The bullies soon found another target. So things went back to normal. We never talked about what happened again. We carried on with our lives as per usual, memories of that day left far behind us.
That last year before he was due to attend university, we went down to the lakeside one more time. The winter ice stretched to the end of the horizon, where the treetops chafed the bleeding gash of the sky.
“This is the place they were playing,” Geoffrey said, pointing. “And then they chased me through this path, deep into that woody area.”
He’d broken our unspoken truce not to broach the subject. But I turned and hugged him. “I still think you’re worth more than the whole lot of them.”
His eyes glinted with the old mischief that had gotten us into trouble so many times. Then he whispered conspiratorially “Let’s go skating!”
“That ice doesn’t look thick enough,” I protested. “Mom would kill us.”
“Oh come on. Please?”
We laced up our skates and stepped gingerly onto the ice. At least I did. Geoffrey raced off, yodelling, as though his skates could slice through all the memories that haunted him.
Halfway out, as he was about to turn and come racing back to me, he suddenly stopped right in the centre of the lake, and turned dead silent.
I saw the long line left by his skates, stretching away from me to where the ice was most fragile. I realised in sudden horror that if he shifted his weight the ice would crack, and he would fall through into the freezing water.
In all the time I took to process this, Geoffrey stretched out his hand towards me imploringly, fear freezing his blue eyes. “Hey man,” He choked, as the cracking ice shifted beneath his feet - “I don’t want to die.”
“You are not going to die!” I could barely get my thick gloves off in order to grab my phone; I was trying to use my teeth but fear and cold was making them chatter too much.
“If you try to save me I’ll drag you in. Get back!” He shouted as the groaning ice forced me helplessly to retreat.
Shivering, he wiped his hand across his nose. My giant of a brother was again reduced to the little boy I had hugged in the shed that day. I desperately thought of all the pictures from the Nature magazines he’d shown me, tried to pick out one that would calm him down.
“Remember that picture of those poppy fields?” I called.
He nodded.
“And those little ducks in that pond - those cute yellow fluffy things. The bluebells in spring. All that. You’re going to see it again, okay? You just have to relax.”
He nodded again, but the ice was cracking fast. A horrible thought was already pulsating through me; he was going to end up like that fox, embalmed beneath the ice.
Geoffrey held out his hand, a tightrope stretched across the chasm between us, where his dreams had been beaten out of him so long ago. I could not save him from his pain then; I could not save him now.
Then the ice around him crumbled and I heard a scream that I only realised was coming from my mouth as the water rushed up to meet him.
***
The ashes of the dead don’t blow away easily. They remain as a breath of wind, a voice in your ear, a noise in the night that makes you turn over and mumble “What do you want?”. I scrutinised all the pages of Geoffrey’s adventures - a little bee, an out-of-focus dandelion - hoping to find something to remind me closely of him.
The closest I ever came was that little red fox, trapped in a layer of ice, eyes wide open in terror. I instinctively ripped out the page and crushed it.
Before I left for university, I visited the lake alone. Looking out over the ice, I tried to imagine what Geoffrey would have been like if he hadn’t attempted that final act of confidence. I wondered if his eyes would have held that same cocky confidence, if his grin would have been wider or more lopsided. He might have been brave enough to tell our parents the truth about himself. Or he might have been showing his own children images of a little red fox, encased deep inside the ice, scrabbling to get free until his bones froze in stubborn defiance.
And looking out over that vast unforgiving expanse, I imagined that I could slip under the ice into the arms of my brother, all grown up.
Sic Itur Ad Astra (such is the pathway to the stars)
|
The tour guide crescendos into impassioned, repressed frustration. “Our income tax is fifty per cent of our salary and that… that only goes into paying two-thirds of the interest, just the interest, can you imagine, on our national debts…”
Curtains drawn against the Mediterranean glare, I sit, restless, as the coach trundles on.
Her voice, controlled but seething, is a merciless scythe, cutting through gelatinous pretence.
The bus rumbles and the curtains part. The first glimpse is otherworldly. So is the next, and the next, and the next. I cannot look away.
The sky is stolen of definition, inch by blue inch, by creeping fog. Far, far away across the vegetation-layered terrain, a pearl in an oyster, the silvered sea undulates like reams of shining silk, light falling on the crests and darkness gathering in the troughs. This was the inspiration of the Impressionists: a fog-misted, looking-glass version of the real, material world.
I would scrabble for my camera, but I know the image would never measure up. This tableau is cursed to exist only in memory. I sit, rapt, torn at the fact that every turn brings me further from that fable-like interplay of ocean and light, but closer to the fabled end of the land, beginning of the sea.[i]
Our destination doesn’t disappoint. A cross atop a hewn stone monument marks the westernmost point of continental Europe. A serpentine footway threads through a field of stubby, succulent ice plants. The alluring red of the lighthouse is a robin’s breast. The height of the drop is exquisite. The ocean is unending.
Cabo da Roca is a place sailors dream and dread of, I imagine, with its lure of a lighthouse, its cliffs and crags. The ocean roars savagely, a beast freed, relentless in its ravishing of the cape. Sea foam, white like driven snow, boils and roils among rocks below. The intense blue curve of the horizon slots into the light, bright sky.
And I fancied that I — in reality a little Far Eastern nobody — was a great explorer, a Columbus or a Magellan, perhaps, that, without navigation by starlight, without hardships aboard ships, I had discovered Atlantis on the edge of the Atlantic.
On the seaside highway down to Cascais, I have a reprise of the salt-tang of the ocean, of a rough, rocky beach, of waves like flaring flamenco dresses, of sea spray so wild it is the flecks on stallions’ muzzles, of an unknown urge to leap and shout and uncouple oneself from gravity, to fly off over the insane Atlantic.
Atlas shrugged, and waves bore down into the Atlantic. Against the peace in chaos that is the ocean, the concepts of self, society, species wash out and are carried away. Even the tour guide puts her previous grievances against the state into hibernation, immersing herself in the majesty the country is able to provide her. No one is immune to the dominion of Poseidon.
Muse-struck, I cannot help but aspire to transmute the acid-intensity, the exultation, into symbols and sound. To live to transcribe these moments into the tide of human consciousness is, I realise, a calling without equal.
We journey, and are changed. We experience, and are redefined. We need the inexorable surf, and the immutable stars, to know that we are so very, very small.
Curtains drawn against the Mediterranean glare, I sit, restless, as the coach trundles on.
Her voice, controlled but seething, is a merciless scythe, cutting through gelatinous pretence.
The bus rumbles and the curtains part. The first glimpse is otherworldly. So is the next, and the next, and the next. I cannot look away.
The sky is stolen of definition, inch by blue inch, by creeping fog. Far, far away across the vegetation-layered terrain, a pearl in an oyster, the silvered sea undulates like reams of shining silk, light falling on the crests and darkness gathering in the troughs. This was the inspiration of the Impressionists: a fog-misted, looking-glass version of the real, material world.
I would scrabble for my camera, but I know the image would never measure up. This tableau is cursed to exist only in memory. I sit, rapt, torn at the fact that every turn brings me further from that fable-like interplay of ocean and light, but closer to the fabled end of the land, beginning of the sea.[i]
Our destination doesn’t disappoint. A cross atop a hewn stone monument marks the westernmost point of continental Europe. A serpentine footway threads through a field of stubby, succulent ice plants. The alluring red of the lighthouse is a robin’s breast. The height of the drop is exquisite. The ocean is unending.
Cabo da Roca is a place sailors dream and dread of, I imagine, with its lure of a lighthouse, its cliffs and crags. The ocean roars savagely, a beast freed, relentless in its ravishing of the cape. Sea foam, white like driven snow, boils and roils among rocks below. The intense blue curve of the horizon slots into the light, bright sky.
And I fancied that I — in reality a little Far Eastern nobody — was a great explorer, a Columbus or a Magellan, perhaps, that, without navigation by starlight, without hardships aboard ships, I had discovered Atlantis on the edge of the Atlantic.
On the seaside highway down to Cascais, I have a reprise of the salt-tang of the ocean, of a rough, rocky beach, of waves like flaring flamenco dresses, of sea spray so wild it is the flecks on stallions’ muzzles, of an unknown urge to leap and shout and uncouple oneself from gravity, to fly off over the insane Atlantic.
Atlas shrugged, and waves bore down into the Atlantic. Against the peace in chaos that is the ocean, the concepts of self, society, species wash out and are carried away. Even the tour guide puts her previous grievances against the state into hibernation, immersing herself in the majesty the country is able to provide her. No one is immune to the dominion of Poseidon.
Muse-struck, I cannot help but aspire to transmute the acid-intensity, the exultation, into symbols and sound. To live to transcribe these moments into the tide of human consciousness is, I realise, a calling without equal.
We journey, and are changed. We experience, and are redefined. We need the inexorable surf, and the immutable stars, to know that we are so very, very small.
POETRY
Musings About The Abstract Nonsensical Of The World At Large
|
 
|
.
.
.
–Because there are too many things not definable by the human language
Empathy what empathy
Don’t make me laugh there’s no such thing as empathy --
–Because four or five or twenty letters can’t capture all we ever want to say
– And to the last few days of the earth will I love you, or maybe not -
You’ll never know what I’m really thinking
And I intend to keep it that way.
––
Who told you that life was ever easy?
( –Too many things too little time)
Are you going to learn how to succeed tonight?
(– Keep your head down or you’re asking for trouble)
Did you know squirrels climb up trees faster than they can walk on ground–
( –Maybe that’s how we should live)
S
i
d
e
w
a
y
s
F o r w a r d s
( – to see the world upside down for a change.)
I’m too tired now; perhaps it’s just time
t
o
s l e e p
.
.
–Because there are too many things not definable by the human language
Empathy what empathy
Don’t make me laugh there’s no such thing as empathy --
–Because four or five or twenty letters can’t capture all we ever want to say
– And to the last few days of the earth will I love you, or maybe not -
You’ll never know what I’m really thinking
And I intend to keep it that way.
––
Who told you that life was ever easy?
( –Too many things too little time)
Are you going to learn how to succeed tonight?
(– Keep your head down or you’re asking for trouble)
Did you know squirrels climb up trees faster than they can walk on ground–
( –Maybe that’s how we should live)
S
i
d
e
w
a
y
s
F o r w a r d s
( – to see the world upside down for a change.)
I’m too tired now; perhaps it’s just time
t
o
s l e e p
How To Sell Your Heart
|
|
The way to break a heart is not to drop it,
But to turn it up in overdrive.
Forming up in perfect syncopation
of dots and dashes.
Sending Morse code,
Through shy short and long glances.
Frozen in expectation,
Till the shock of the fall;
No other bids? None?
Going once... Going twice...
No you can't refuse;
Once broken, considered sold.
But to turn it up in overdrive.
Forming up in perfect syncopation
of dots and dashes.
Sending Morse code,
Through shy short and long glances.
Frozen in expectation,
Till the shock of the fall;
No other bids? None?
Going once... Going twice...
No you can't refuse;
Once broken, considered sold.