The flora and fauna of Colombia comprises some of the rarest species of plants and animals in the world. Desert, rainforest, deciduous, and plains support 45 000 species of plants, ranging from the Cedar, the Walnut, to the Oak. The animals of Colombia: Anteaters, Monkeys, Pigs, Tapirs, Pumas, Otters, and Bears. In Colombia, variety is the spice of life.

“This is your Captain speaking…”

SQ 22 was half-full, and mostly comfortable. The take-off smell of jet fuel had dissipated long ago, replaced by the odourless silica vapour of canned oxygen. The economy class cabin was filled with a wide variety of people. There were kids trying to sleep, worried businessmen, wistful grandmothers, pregnant women, hustled fathers, carefree teenagers, college students with backpacks below the seat, and a variety of flight attendants, gay, straight and women, gliding up and down the ailes, smiling with efficiency. The seats were beginning to get uncomfortable, and the passengers, sleeping and awake, shifted restlessly on rigid upholstery, kicking arhythmically the seats in front of them. Smarter passengers made pilgramages to empty rows where they could stretch out across two or more seats, making do with half a metre’s worth of width and rudimentary pillows and blankets, refugee camp style.

Jennifer Khoo, lead stewardess, glided down the cabin to the back of the flight with infinite poise and grace, professional and smart, handsome and spectacular, silent and farting, as the passengers attended to the Captain’s soothing voice.

“…if you look out the window, you will see Peacock Island. A singular feature of the Pacific; an island inhabited wholly by peacocks.”

At this height, you wouldn’t be able to see any peacocks, or any island, in any detail. Furthermore, the clouds were obscuring any view of the ground. So no one would have been able to see the peacocks or the island even if they tried. However, people on the left side of the plane, and those on the right, looked out the windows and strained at the blinding whiteness of sun-drenched clouds stretching off into the horizon and flaring at the plexiglass windows. Those in the centre of the plane rolled their eyes and tried to sleep, read, or work. Everyone assumed Peacock Island was visible from the other side of the plane.

“I bet you there’s no Peacock Island,” said the man wearing a flannel shirt, slacks, black rimmed glasses, and intentionally messy hair. His name is Kenneth. He prides himself on being trendy, plugged in, and world-weary. Walking out into the world, seeing other people going about their lives in routine ways completely unlike his own depresses him to no end. And so he ensconses himself in a womb-like room, reading books about the history of the end of the world, and venturing out for the occasional lecture, kebab or conference. Kenneth likes to talk about suicide. In fact, he once tried it with a bottle of pills and wine, but he was found by his mother and taken to the hospital. Pale to the point of sickness, the man took a deep breath of canned air and started to lecture to the closest person he could find. There was no man on Earth who could stop him.

“The colours of the peacock’s feathers might lead one to believe in an upper being, separated from us but at once an integral part of our culture, our physiognomy. Beliefs and systems connected by psychology and anthropology pointing towards an omniscient thousand-eyed deity looking down upon us all, filtered through the feathers of the ostentatious display of avian masculinity. If you see my point, that this kind of abstract relationship, attractive to the human desire for hope and wishfulness, is at the same time repulsive and beautiful.”

Leroy, aged 6, feet tapping on the floor, ignored him and looked out the window. He saw neither clouds, nor sea, nor islands, nor peacocks. He saw a tropical vista, complete with pterodactyls, anacondas, caterpillars, rainforests, orchids, elephants, leeches, pigs, chickens, and hippos. Bugs scuttled on the forest floor, hiding in between blades of grass and under decaying leaves. Snails and frogs frolicked in the vegetation. Birds of all shapes and sizes picked amongst the animals. And lizards scrambled up damp tree trunks, looking up to the yellow-green light from the canopy. It was a riot of movement, with lemurs screaming, panthers slinking, sloths yawning, stingrays whirling, punctuated by gusts of air bubbles rising and popping from the quicksand below, sending leaves and petals bursting forth like spore clouds from urchin colonies.

Meanwhile, 50 000 feet up in the sky, a 30-year old, chronically depressed flight attendant, attempted to guess at the digestive system of birds. She wondered how it would differ from the human digestive system, and then continued on attempt to recall her primary school science classes and secondary school biology classes. This tiny seed of curiosity would soon grow to become a determination to learn.

In a few months time, Jennifer would resign from her job as flight attendant and enrol in a Bachelor’s Course in Science, with a view to progress into Zoology. In time, she will become an expert on Ornithology and gain fame as a strident activist passionate about the preservation of the habitat of an as-yet undiscovered species of cockatoo in the Brazilian Congo.

But now, she stocked up the food trolley with neatly compartmentalised trays of food. There was the choice of Braised Ginger Chicken and Steamed Fish. Both served with vegetables and rice. Also along for the trolley ride of gastronomy was a tiny ball of bread, salad and cheesecake. Jennifer stared down the aisle, daring passengers to leave for the toilet. It always happens; someone, upon seeing the trolley of food rolling down the aisle, pushed by a slim, well dressed girl and a fabulous man, thinks immediately about the things that he, she, or it, will not be able to do when a barrier of food slowly moves towards them, and then makes the choice to accomplish it. And Jennifer will have to find a way to acquiesce, trained to keep her curses unknown to all around her.

Efficient to a T, Jennifer proceeded down the aisle, robotically greeting, smiling, serving, and placating passengers, even the ones wanting to go to the toilet. Smiling, she served Kenneth the intellectual, who ordered the fish, because he feels that eating chicken is unethical. She also served Leroy, bored and distracted, and wondered what he was thinking about. She wondered where the boy’s parents were. And she wondered why he was sitting next to Kenneth.

“My friend,” said Kenneth, sniffing, “there are a great many things in Life that one should be aware of. I can only impart a few nuggets of wisdom onto you.”

He took a petite slice of fish and placed it delicately in his mouth, visibly grimacing as the food entered his mouth and he began chewing, as the gravy he carefully tried to keep within his mouth dribbled down his perfect lawn-trimmed stubble.

“Eating food is imperative but not important. And one should always think about the animal one eats. Did you know that chickens are practically tortured before being made into the dry breast meat you see before you? What about chicken nuggets? Free range chickens? They’re not running around a meadow eating corn. They’re eating corn out of plastic packets in tiny little cages that allow them to hop a little bit, as opposed to being completely immobile as the non-free-range chickens.”

“I do think vegans are a little bit annoying. They keep talking. They don’t shut up. Going on and on about the ideals of veganism and how it’s all so different from vegetrianism. Everything comes from animals. No? It’s the coalition of the high and mighty and the idiotic. Welcome to the real world assholes!”

In the cockpit, the pilots talked about geopolitical issues. Surrounded by clear blue sky, they discussed nuclear proliferation, anti-nuclear power, relations between China and America, and the rise of the corporation. Feeling like victims of the system of global conglomerates, yet somehow feeding off it. They wondered, if it were possible to trace the number of deaths in Bolivia to the number of plane engines made, much like how carbon credits, by some arbitrary process, account for the number of miles flown in an aeroplane, from the Bermuda Triangle to the Bolivian Rainforest, and how it connects the quantity of trees re-planted to sustain life again.

For they had no knowledge of the intricate web of life teeming on Peacock Island, the alligators chewing on peanut butter, bats snoozing underneath football-field sized leaves, lions zooming from zebra to zebra, clamouring for food and water, as they jumped and swam across the islands of a brilliant glowing delta, decorated as technicoloured eyes blinking at the afternoon sun.

And as the engines hummed and the cabin lights dimmed. As the windows, one by one, shut their eyes to the sky, the pilots in the cockpit set upon a new conversation topic; the possibility of birds flying into engines. They remembered their initial jokes of pelicans flying into engines, bird in one end, fish puree out the other. The poor bird, having already achieved flight, and ascending above asphalt and grass and trees and fruits and panthers, to be sucked into a roaring black hole which chops them up and melts them and confuses their internal organs, and their food, with exhaust, shot out on the other side as just another red blooded cloud.

Kenneth used to believe in a fair and just world. Where hard work pays off and crime does not pay. Where his parents were perfect and people were naturally nice. Where he had a childhood sweetheart who would become his girlfriend and, eventually, wife. He believed in good times, happy times, with friends and family. When he looked forward to celebrating his birthday with a party, and everyone would come and drink and be merry, and all-around enjoy themselves. When cancer only happened to strangers. He thought of holidays by the beach, beers in the evening, crystal clear water and MSG-free potato chips. When having what you wanted meant having what you need, and having what you need only meant you would eventually get what you wanted, ridicule-free. A world without social engineering, racism, burning bridges nor public humiliation.

But all Kenneth sees now is tragedy clothed in dollar-signed wallpaper. He sees his life draining from him every morning when he looks up at his ceiling, as he eats his breakfast, shits, pees, sips his coffee and leaves his home, to begin another day of lecturing to teenagers about Ancient Greek history, bringing linguistics, historical medicine, geography, wolves, and mountain climbing into the conversation. And slowly, but surely, he inserts a level of worldiness and pragmatism into his lectures, with the intention of preparing his students for a world of failure, cruelty and well-meaning mindlessness.

And Jennifer munched on a piece of cheese on a dry biscuit, counting the spots on a galley locker, as her watch ticked away towards the last hour of the flight when she would announce, in a calm, well paced, voice, to the passengers to fasten their seatbelts, close their laptops and switch off their iPods. Boredom, she thinks, is like a seagull flying behind an endless silk curtain, flower motifs repeating endlessly across time and space, and meanwhile the fish are getting away. Jennifer spins on her heel, walks to the intercom, and speaks:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we are beginning our descent into Peacock Island, please fasten your orange juice, relax your seatbelts and stow away your troubled shoes.”

The hum of the engines changes in tone, and inertia ensconses its grip on the passengers of the plane, as they begin to wonder, as they begin to ask, weren’t they meant to be touching down in Colombia?

An old man, nervous about landings, tosses a Viagra pill down his throat on accident. His wife fidgets nervously with her wedding ring, closes her eyes, and dreams about a crumbling factory in Birmingham, 1973. Their grandson, a bulbous child of five, begins to cry, starting off a chain reaction of other fat children crying, as their parents attempt to employ toolboxes worth of tactics to placate them: from cooing, to back-scratching, to rocking slowly, to grinning manically.

And as the choir of babies screams populated the air, the lights in the cabin brighten, as Jennifer and company glide down the ailes distributing hot towels and collecting headphones, reminding the passengers in soft, trained, tones to return their seats to their original position.

Leroy propped his seat back up, and, already an experienced traveller, began to swallow as the cabin pressure increased with the descent of the plane. For the first time in hours, he turned to look at Kenneth, murmuring to himself as he buried his head in a non-fiction semi-scientific text: The Mating Lives of Pigeons by Sir Humptington Salaad.

A text with little connection to the real world, where he could pretend the only evidence of humans was in the objective observation of bird life. He examined closely a line-drawing of a pigeon; dull, lifeless eyes, strokes representing feathers, and feet like structured mating earthworms. He lost himself in the contours of its beak, and found himself recalling the in-flight safety video of the vessel.

It began with a yellow screen, with the majestic strings of the London Symphony Orchestra in the background. In faded a tracking shot of the passenger cabin from the fore to the aft in the point of view of a mouse, which climbed up the galley wall to spin round as a Computer Generated, unnaturally voluptuous cabin crew member, rumoured by the pilots to be modelled on the wife of the Head of Air Traffic Control of Heathrow Airport, mouthing instructions and the possible consequences of not following said instructions. Subtitles in Swahili, English, and Flemish appeared below her breasts. Ravel’s String Quartet in F major: II. Assez vif. Très rythmé played in the background. In a postmodern twist, a second parallel safety flight video appeared behind the CGI woman, showing real world footage of aviation disasters as well as penguins dutifully waddling into an aeroplane, strapping themselves properly into customised penguin-seats, pulling on oxygen masks to offer to their baby penguins first, and inflating life jackets before diving into Antarctic waters, blowing whistles and flashing lights to attract attention.

It was utterly preposterous.

Kenneth was inspired by his vision. He turned excitedly to Leroy to share his knowledge, but his glasses fell off with the swift left-ward motion of his head and the sudden upward motion of the aeroplane as it encountered an air pocket.

An old man with a viagra-spawned erection wondered why he was having an erection, the blood in his penis taking advantage of the momentum to further engorge his wrinkled member, shocked daughter looking on, comatose wife asleep.

A flight attendant, fighting an onset of depression by gorging on jelly, suddenly dropped her spoonful of jelly onto the floor, prompting the jelly to bounce jovially onto the carpet. She wept.

A 6 six year old boy imagined a flock of storks, each carrying a package of joy, flying beneath a blazing sun, from the West to the East, chattering to themselves in low pitched cackles. Shadows gliding across choppy waters.

“Apologies for that, we encountered an unexpected air pocket. We are proceeding on our descent to Colombia.”

Kenneth was about to talk about surrealism, and its emergence from Dada. He would wax lyrical about the death of rationality, and the liberation of imagination from the bourgeois cage of the logical. He would namedrop Breton, Chirico, Oppenheim, and, of course, Dali, with detailed descriptions of their particular brand of art and its relationship to the overall movement of a general irreverence towards reason and logic. It is the importance of the mind, the non-suppression of the consciousness, that gives surrealism its power and effect. He would discuss its legacy in present day artforms, from visual art to text, to music, to films. Characters undergo hallucinations, the real becomes the unreal, the line between reality and emotion becomes blurred as psychology violently, or non-violently, manhandles its way into the frame.  He would lament the corruption of the form into impure mediums, a once-pure art movement used as commercialism for selling shampoos, soaps, computers, sweets and so on. And then he would lament about the loss of freedom, and the artificial freedom we’ve been given that is merely well-hidden imperialism from multi-national empires, selling shampoos, soaps, tea, phones, beer, computers, created by slave labour in third world countries.

But as he found his glasses, he caught a flash of a pelican gliding out of sight from the porthole. White feathers and gigantic orange beak, backed by a sun-dappled sea. The pelican, in a majestic swoop of its wings glided upwards, out of the tiny frame of the porthole, barely registering in the flightpath of the aeroplane. Kenneth, a little shocked, a little tired, and a little blind, then looked at Leroy, or, to be exact, the back of Leroy’s head, with his wiry black hair so hopeful and familiar. He bit his tongue and put on his glasses, staring ahead at the seat before him, waiting wearily for the landing of SQ22.

On the tarmac of the runway of the airport of the Colombian Empire, a lone peacock emerged from the vegetation. It straddled the edge of the tarmac for a few minutes. It was a little traumatised; it had had a bad morning, when its mate was mistaken for an alligator and was shot dead by a .34 calibre rifle. The peacock wandered into the centre of the tarmac, its tiny feet clicking on searing stone. Heat waves danced upwards from the ground and distorted the image of the bird, giving it the impression of a strange blue flame emerging from the ground.

As the roar of the Rolls-Royce Trent 800 engines shot out from the sky, with the plane descending rapidly onto the runway, the peacock, oblivious to the sound, slowly turned about and faced the behemoth bearing down upon it. It opened its wings and displayed an achingly beautiful collage of electric blue, violet, green, yellow and black feathers, resembling a canvas of a thousand mystical eyes greeting the pilots as the plane’s front wheel narrowly missed it and slammed onto the runway. The tyres screeched, the engines blasted, as the surrounding vegetation bent and broke with the force of the plane’s momentum. Traces of jet fuel filled the air as it billowed about from the force of the engines, while the peacock stood unruffled. It was completely untouched by tyre, smoke, heat, and air. Its feathers, feet, head and beak were intact and unharmed. The peacock, its display finished, strode off the tarmac and disappeared into the vegetation of the Colombian Metropolitan Airport.

“So, what exactly is the lesson here?” said the Captain.

A peacock, living a newly solitary existence, walks onto a runway, directly onto the path of a landing plane. For a normal man, this spells deafness and insanity, if lucky. Most people will be blown off from the tarmac, lifted into the air and brutally tossed into the surrounding shrubs. But the peacock stood impervious, untouched, effortlessly imperious. A monument to life. Then, it is said, and can be said now, before, and evermore: that our Father, our God, our Saviour, is once and always for all time, truly a loving and merciful Lord.

Jake Gyllenhaal is in the bathroom, shaving for the part of Batman in The Dark Knight. Today they would be filming the scene in his penthouse, Bruce Wayne’s penthouse, where the Joker crashes the party and releases Rachel Dawes, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, out the window. Today, Jake Gyllenhaal has a headache.

“It’s this dull solid thing in my head, it just stays there in the background, throbbing away. It started this morning, and the Panadols aren’t working. It’s driving me nuts,” he confides to Maggie.

“Bruce, please, I know you feel that you’re some kind of all-mighty bringer of justice, and you want to be the hero, the guy who saves all of Gotham, but no one is going to care. I don’t care. I think it’s selfish. I think you’re selfish, Bruce,” says Maggie, “Because justice isn’t the product of one man, justice is a system. A system of many hardworking, nameless, anonymous, men and women, sweating away under the glare of fluorescent tubes deep into the night, and you want to label it? With an arbitrary sign inspired by your childhood fear of bats? Bruce, it’s a travesty. And now you complain to me about a headache? You’re a disaster Bruce.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal, as Rachel Dawes, brown hair tied back, thin eyebrows, curled eyelashes, concerned blue eyes, matt-red lipstick, lightly kisses her brother on the lips, softly nuzzling his stubble.

“You missed a spot, Bruce,” she frowns, turning to sashay down the movie set, revealing her bare back to her brother, heading straight into the arms of a grinning Aaron Eckhart-as-Harvey Dent.

Aaron flashes a smarmy grin in Jake’s direction. He’s telling me he’s won, Jake thinks to himself, that he’s got the girl, and all my millions as Bruce Wayne isn’t going to get me shit-all in a world of integrity. Jake swallows his rage, and heads to the bathroom, fists clenched, to shave off his remaining stubble.

There’s a saying that trouble comes in waves, and as Jake accidentally cuts his chin while shaving, he hears a loud, slow, cackling behind him. Jake spins around, and he sees Heath Ledger, greasepaint caked on his face, lipstick smeared across his mouth, black foundation filling in his sunken eyes. Heath licks his lips, and grins, baring artificially yellowed teeth. Lying half dressed on the floor, Heath says to Jake, “That’s just the beginning, you know.”

Jake’s gorgeous aqua blue eyes goggle.

“I was upstairs, Chris Nolan, he said to me, that the movie will one day end. There was a child, like a little boy, man-child, blonde hair, blue eyes, who didn’t know what the fuck. He spent his days pretending to be a BMX champion, singing seventies hits careening down steep hills. Mobile, like, kept riding head first into walls, and cars, and rose bushes. He thought he had a helmet on, but it was a box, he was pretending, see. One day, the kid, was brushing his teeth and noticed he was looking at some dude in a rabbit suit, from the future. The rabbit told him to go flood his school, so he did. Then the rabbit told him to burn down a paedophiles house, so he did. And then he had a dent in his head and he found out the rabbit killed his girlfriend in a drunk driving accident. He was distraught, so he shot the rabbit and walked up to his fucking BMX bike hill and sat down like some idiot. And then he cycled back to his room and went to sleep, which was when an aeroplane engine crashed down on him. He should’ve worn a real helmet.”

Hysterical laughter. Heath is method-acting, Jake knows, but this is the Joker, which is way more terrifying than his last role opposite Jake, a Gay cowboy. Jake resolutely turns round, focusing those pretty deep blue eyes on the sink as he washes his face and applies flesh coloured plaster to his chin. Hopefully Chris wouldn’t notice.

“I know what’s going on between you two,” Heath shouts, “you and Maggie!”

Jake is pushing on the toilet door, hand grasping at the handle. He stops.

“She’s my sister.”

“And you love her!” Heath screams, “and what am I to do, huh?” Heath’s body is twitching violently.

Heath continues, “You leave me here, rotting in these filthy clothes and lipstick, like a short-term piece of amusement. I wasn’t there to be your little clown, your two-bit stiff-necked Frankenstein in shining armour. I was there for keeps! That was real!”

Heath’s voice has reached a shrill pitch, and Jake, closing his eyes, shuts from Heath’s view those beautiful wide sky blue orbs, and runs out of the toilet.

They spend the rest of the day working on the penthouse scene. Heath-as-the-Joker glares at Jake the entire time, and gives a brilliant performance in threatening Rachel Dawes, grabbing her so roughly he leaves a dark bruise on her waist which will take weeks to heal. For the fight between Batman and the Joker, Heath pulls no punches and kicks Jake in the crotch so hard the batsuit cracks open.

Once Chris Nolan says he’s satisfied, the actors and the crew pack up for the day and head back home, to prepare for yet another day of tedious shooting. Jake takes a detour to the gas station to pick up a six-pack of beer, and then heads to his apartment on 3^rd Street.

Jake Gyllenhaal, actor in such films as Brokeback Mountain (with Heath Ledger), Donnie Darko (with his sister) and Jarhead, is exhausted. Action movies are not his thing. Getting beaten up by stuntmen, and worse of all your co-star, while having to balance a dramatic element while wearing a 50-pound batsuit is no easy task. He collapses on the couch and switches on the TV. It doesn’t work.

“Not again,” Jake mutters, striding up to the TV and smacking it hard. Nothing happens. Jake crouches down and checks if the TV is plugged in, and discovers that someone has cut the power cable. And then he hears the music, loud dissonant squalls coming from his bedroom. He recognises it as a Sonic Youth track, from the album ‘Goo’. He remembers the title of the track, ‘Kool Thing’, supposedly a paean by Kim Gordon to her childhood crush, LL Cool J. Chuck D contributes guest vocals.

Jake opens his bedroom door and is greeted by the sight of his sister on his bed, naked, save for a leather collar, and reading a worn-out copy of the SCUM[1] manifesto. The lights have been dimmed, and the shower is running, sending steam wafting in from the toilet. Maggie Gyllenhaal has a great figure; supple, well-sized breasts, a trimmed bush, and curves to die for, emphasised recently by her recent pregnancy. Poker faced, she stares at Jake, gets up, and sidles towards her brother. She presses herself against his crotch.

“Kool thing let me play with your radio, move me turn me on, baby-o,” Kim Gordon sings.

Maggie unbuttons her brother’s shirt, slipping her hand into the gap, gently rubbing his chest hair, lightly twisting his nipple. Bruce Wayne moans and produces an erection, which presses against his jeans into Rachel’s waist.

“I’ll be your slave, give you a shave.”

By now Bruce’s shirt has come off, and his pelvis slowly rocks back and forth. He’s kissing Rachel, and Rachel’s pushing her tongue in his mouth, as her hands busy themselves with taking off his belt.

“What’re you gonna do for me?,” Kim Gordon sings, “I mean, are you gonna liberate us girls from male, white, corporate, oppression?”

Jake suddenly realises where he is and what he’s doing. His stunning magnificent blue eyes widen in horror as his sister distends her mouth from his, brushing her cheek against his jaw. This is his sister, he loves her and would do anything for her. But not in this way. Maybe, probably, for Rachel Dawes, and she’s no Rachel Dawes. But then again, who is? He feels his sister’s slender hands encircle Bruce Wayne’s penis. Waves of sexual pleasure pulsate from his crotch and down his legs. Jake pushes her away.

“Fear of a female planet, baby,” Chuck D’s voice booms.

Jake gives off a half scream, and, trousers round his feet, boxers round his knees, he hobbles out of his apartment, slamming the door shut behind him. He pulls his trousers and boxers up, and, panicking, runs down ten floors and out onto the street. And then he continues running, following whichever pathway that presents itself. Jake runs for an hour, weeping and wailing, till he reaches a fence and climbs it, finding himself on the fairway of a golf course. The full moon is out, illuminating rolling foothills from the tee to the green. Jake, shirtless and sweating, body glistening in the silver moonlight, sits on the edge of a bunker and tries to calm himself down.

And that’s when Heath turns up, still in Joker costume, rolling down the bunker. He spits sand from his mouth and shakes his head like a wet dog, spraying sand and grease in all directions. Heath limps up the incline of the bunker, and grabs Jake’s shoulders for support. He pulls himself to Jake’s face, and kisses him aggressively, pushing him to the ground. He has horrible bad breath. It smells like decomposing rat.

Heath breathes an extended sigh, and whispers to Jake in an irregular, galloping rhythm, “My love, it speaks like silence. And baby, I’ve got blood in my eyes for you. And down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach, I tell myself I can’t help falling in love with you. But you leave me shattered and ignored, and I will admit that I ain’t treated you right, and I tell myself you’re the reason I’m travelling on. But you know, you have no need to take me so serious, tho you be true like ice and fire, ‘cos baby I need someone to put a on blanket on my bed, ‘cos my warehouse eyes and Arabian drums beat for you, and I don’t want you to make me lonesome again, and baby you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

Jake opens his mouth to scream as Heath manhandles Jake’s body. He turns him face-down, pulls down his trousers, and then undoes his own fly. Heath roughly pulls apart Jake’s shaking buttcheeks, exposing a hairy, radiant arsehole. He half-heartedly spits, and then thrusts in his throbbing uncut white-powdered member.

And so Heath pounds his way into Jake’s prostate, Jake screaming into Heath’s gloved hand, trying his hardest to focus on anything else; a tree, a golf ball, his sister, in a leather collar, lying on his bed in his steamy bedroom, seducing her way into Bruce Wayne’s head. Or his sister, as a child, refusing to share her birthday cake with him. Or their roadtrip to Seattle to mourn the death of Kurt Cobain. Jake finds he can’t think of anything to get away from the pain and confusion, and faints.

The warm rays of the Wednesday morning sun strike Jake’s naked body, as he groggily rubs his magnificent striking puppy dog adorable blue eyes awake. He’s naked, with a sore, stung, arse, lying in a bunker, covered in a light coating of sand, wearing a Santa hat. He knows he has to get out, and get home, before the office people start to come out for work, if they haven’t already.

The city, in its efficient, clockwork, way, awakens, yawns and stretches. People spill out of their front doors, crisp and clean, smelling of deodorant and baby powder, black shoes, starched shirts and silk ties. Cafés and stores turn their signs from ‘closed’ to ‘open’, getting ready for the morning crowd searching for coffee, biscuits and early morning snacks. Cars and buses and trains begin their circuitous commutes from suburb to CBD, from apartment  to office, along roads big and small. And in a small alleyway, a naked Jake Gyllenhaal runs desperately, clad in a Santa hat, picking up discarded clothes from garbage bins.

He discovers he’s quite close to the studio, so he breaks into the wardrobe department, wearing a denim jacket and board shorts, and his Santa hat, and picks out Bruce Wayne’s clothes; a white cotton business shirt, well-fitting business trousers, and a tuxedo. He walks out to the set just as the rest of the cast comes in.

Maggie sidles up to him. “You smell like dead fish,” she says, smiling seductively, “what have you been up to last night?

She briefly rubs his crotch, and turns away as Chris Nolan starts barking orders. Aaron walks by, stares and turns up his nose at Jake. And then Heath jumps in from behind and pinches Jake’s arse.

“Darling you look just absolutely faaab!” he screams. He scratches his head, and moon walks backwards, hand on crotch, making thrusting motions with his pelvis. And then he sees Maggie, still smiling seductively at Jake. Hurt, he spins round to Jake, eyes welling up with tears.

Chris Nolan has decided to re-shoot the part of the scene where the Joker drops Rachel out of the window, so Jake has to don the batsuit, Rachel has to wear her long dress, and the Joker can stay in what he’s wearing.

The wind machines have been turned on, and Jake, Heath and Maggie take their places in front of a shattered window and a blue screen. Chris yells ‘Action!’, and the three begin the scene, except something goes wrong. Heath, still glowering, lets go of Maggie immediately, without reciting any of the written dialogue. He proceeds to pull out a gun from his coat, and points it at a horrified Maggie lying on the foam.

Chris is yelling ‘Cut!’, but Heath is still brandishing the gun, shaking, and staring at Jake.

He says, “I can’t take this anymore, Jack fuckin’ twist , after the things we did, I thought we had something, and then you turn and play both sides! Well, I’m not letting some slag lawyer, who really loves Harvey ‘Two-Face’ Dent anyway, take you away from me!”

And then the Joker shoots Rachel Dawes between the eyes. Jake’s sister lies still on a foam bed, blood collecting in a growing pool of red outlining her body.

Jake, distraught, lunges at Heath, punching him in the nose.  Stunned, Heath staggers back, and Jake takes the opportunity to wrestle the gun from Heath’s startled hands. Now Jake has the gun, and proceeds to aim it at the Joker’s head. He’s making pathetic high-pitched whinnying noises. Heath, smacking his lips, says sardonically, “So it’s come to this. It’s the Batman, finally holding a deadly weapon, and unafraid to use it. Go on, pull the trigger, Batman, do it! Let your misplaced notion of ‘Justice’ go flying off into the dark night! Shoot. Me. In. The. Fucking. Head!”

“I am not Batman!” Jake yells, pulling the trigger and killing Heath.

The studio goes silent, the cast and crew and stare open-mouthed at Jake, holding the pistol, flanked by the corpses of Heath Ledger and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

In a panic, he runs out of the studio, back into the street, and keeps running, just like the night before, just like when he was running away from his role, and into another, of himself, of another character, of another person. Jake runs into a service station toilet and plants himself in a cubicle, crying.

He knows the police would soon be after him, he can almost hear the sirens. Jake stares wildly at the blue-green confines of the cubicle, and shuts his stunning radiant adorable blue eyes tight, as an aeroplane engine falls from the sky, into the city, onto the service station. Into a lonely, stinking toilet cubicle, inhabited by a man with a pair of jaw-droppingly deep, universe-encompassing, ocean-sized, baby blue eyes.

[1] Society for Cutting Up Men

- Andrew Cheah, June 2009

Behind me, Regina strummed a major chord and started on a stripped-down version of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sway’. I was leaning on a hard cement pillar, gently inhaling on a Dunhill Red, imagining the air filtering itself through the stick of tobacco into my mouth, down my windpipe and into my lungs. Puff after puff, tar, nicotine, ammonia, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, lead, methanol, and so on, swimming in the little air sacs, dissolving in my blood, pumping through my body into every conceivable cell, delivering a slight rush in a faster heartbeat, a little jumpstart to the brain, and a temporary satiation of a pointless addiction.

The smoke exhaled in a grey stream to dissipate across a wooden patio lit by the blue-greens of the bar, the yellow of tiny candles placed on chic picnic tables, and the strange multi-colours from the Christmas lights lying atop wooden slats, an artificial twilight for an ethanol escape.

“It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway.”

Stubbing out my cigarette, I stepped into the chatter and song of the pub, itself lit barely by sporadic lights and a bar, to catch Regina finishing off of the song. Polite applause overlaid the chatter, punctuated at the end with a drunken whistle from the back corner. I was watching Regina smile, laugh lines scarred across her face, when I noticed the woman in the black dress.

She was sitting at the right corner, furthest from the bar. Her fingers played with the stem of a drained martini glass, in which a lone olive, toothpick stabbed through its centre, rolled about comatose. I made my way across the room, picking my way between the midnight drinkers, some laughing, some talking, some dancing impromptu, and others just staring into space, while Regina crooned her way through a Bryan Ferry tune. Random cushions and chairs were strewn about, forcing me to cut a roundabout route from the doorway to the corner.

The woman was sitting sideways in her chair, back leaning against a mirror, watching the scene of the bar inscrutably perform itself. Her head was cocked ever so slightly to the right and leaning forward, having the look of peering upwards distrustfully at the bar. Her face was pearl white, decorated with thin, determined lips, a small, pretty nose, and a pair of large, black, almond eyes, framed by a covering of black, cropped, elfin hair. Along the back of the chair, the woman had hung one arm limply – thin, white and glowing, ending off with five long, slim fingers.

Hands clasped behind my back, I leant forward and asked her, as a waiter would, “Would you like a drink?”

She turned to look at me, eyes moving up to my face. Her lips curving in the dark, she blinked and remarked, “I didn’t know this place had servers.”

“Only for special customers, ma’am,” I replied.

“I wasn’t expecting you to be so punctual.”

“So it’s a dry martini?”

“Gin and tonic.”

Turning towards the bar, I spied the woman in the black dress move her fingers from the stem of the glass to pick up the toothpick with the olive.

Her name was Cecelia Teng, and she had been drinking for close to an hour. She was twenty-nine, a graduate in Marketing and Communications, currently holding a job as a promoter for the National Museum. She used to play volleyball, but stopped when she realised she was only continuing on out of habit. Since then, she told me, laughing, her skin had just become paler and paler as she stopped going out into the sun. Other activities that took up her time were going to the gym, movie marathons with friends, ice skating, clubbing occasionally, playing internet word games at work, pretending to be a film star on Sunday mornings, eating at overpriced food stalls, eating at underpriced restaurants, collecting music, appreciating literature, and, when depressed, reading self-help books.

Cecelia’s favourite movies were, by her own admission, all based on books. She loved Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Godfather (Part II), Cold Mountain, The Great Gatsby, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Kramer vs Kramer and Jurassic Park (Laughter). Inexplicably, she hated The Godfather Part I. The movies she liked best did not correspond with her reading; Cecelia’s favourite writers included Fyodor Dostoevsky, Roald Dahl, Jeanette Winterson, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger (but not Catcher in the Rye), Gunther Grass, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen (but of course), Graham Greene, Henry Miller, De Sade, and Georges Bataille. Music-wise, it was the Velvet Underground, Billie Holliday, Jackson Browne (early), Johnny Cash, Judy Garland, the Carpenters, Belle and Sebastian, Portishead, Hooverphonic, Sigur Ros, A Silver Mt Zion, The Byrds and David Bowie (everything up to and including “Heroes”). When questioned about the Beatles, she gave the answer that she thought they were overrated, although George was hot and Paul was cute.

Regina had finished her set long ago, and the crowd at the bar was beginning to thin out. From our vantage point, we had watched the middle aged couple, obviously there to watch Regina, leave, followed later by the early twenties, heading for whichever club for the night, followed by the more trendy yuppies that have become the mainstay of the Acid Bar, till it was just us. Us and a man in a cowboy get-up, making eyes at a transvestite, sitting opposite a young 20-something couple, obviously not going for drinks and dancing, but not drunk like the two lone businessmen; one bald, the other bearded, burbling rants and proclamations at each other. We could see the bartenders getting restless, polishing wineglasses, while the manager surreptitiously began to count the earnings for the night.

“I wish I could just get up and dance, pirouette my way down Orchard Road, damn the cars.”

“And the traffic lights.”

“And the traffic lights,” she smiled, eyes closed, “all the way to the sea, no, to the airport.”

“To the airport?”

“I want to scream at an airplane.”

It brought to mind a certain advertisement from years ago. I distinctly remember the image of a woman in a floral dress, hair curlers and rolling pin, screaming defiantly at a landing 747. The ad was advertising sanitary pads, I think. It also brought to mind images of Cary Grant being chased down a cornfield in North by Northwest, the only Alfred Hitchcock film I ever watched. I did not find it enjoyable, nor did I find it scary.

Cecelia, giggling, suddenly stood up and tugged at my hand. We walked out to the verandah, dim yellow lights shadowing our faces, Cecelia, with my arms around her, grinning with her eyes shut tight, me stepping deliberately on slats of grey pavement bordering wooden floor. She leaned against a pillar and, from a floral print cigarette case, pulled out a cigarette, long, white and thin. I produced mine, then went on to light hers.

Through the haze of smoke between us, I saw her eyes attempt to read me, roll upwards to the ceiling, and then drop down to my right, to finally settle on my shoes, when they began to glaze over, curtains over a quiet lonely night. I examined the pillar she was leaning on. It was cream white, with lime green old style colonial embellishments. Restored historical buildings, these are called. They used to be shophouses, back when Orchard Road really was an orchard. People would be selling fruits, textiles, vegetables and books at the ground floor, to live and sleep on the second and third floors. Since then, Orchard Road has become the shopping mecca of today, gigantic malls and towering hotels, subterranean underpasses, fast food gantries, and maids and teenagers and families and tourists intermingling in a thick mélange.

And at night, the mélange redistributed itself, from the boutiques to the bars, the offices to the clubs, the cinemas to the LAN shops, and the restaurants to home. I took Cecelia’s hand and led her up Emerald Hill. She was mumbling to herself, smiling at the odd flashing lights in the windows above us. Before us, outside Ice Cold Beer, a yellow-lit fog of cigarette smoke presented itself, ghouls of men and women in trendy clothes, sneakers, loafers, rimless spectacles, spiked hair, and yellow teeth. We sailed past them, stepping between two potted plants serving to stop cars from driving into the smoking area.

Past the potted plants, the street was practically devoid of people. The chatter of the bars receded behind. Only the clicking of Cecelia’s high heels kept us company. Emerald Hill is a street going from Orchard Road up to Cairnhill Circle. It is lined with old Chinese terrace houses, most of which now restored, lived in by those affluent enough to be able to afford living two minutes away from town. One half of the street is taken up by a one-way road, the other by a pavement. We careened from the grassy edges of the street, across the road, and up the pavement, to the gates of the next house, wherein we bounced off to the other side of the street again.

We passed the Chatsworth International school, its gates shut tight for the night. Cecelia said, “Did you know an ordinary woman can lift a bus? It’s all in the mind. I read on the net the other day, about how this girl with her daughter stuck beneath a vehicle, in her desperation, lifted up a bus with just her bare hands and pulled her daughter out from beneath.”

There were many parts of that story that did not conform to logic. I wanted to ask her if she lifted the bus with both hands, or if the child was conscious, but I refrained. I said to her, “The school here used to be another school. Apparently it also used to be haunted.”

Cecelia let out a small girlish giggle. “Truth is just a bad rumour,” she murmured.

I pulled her closer to me, holding her by the waist. She allowed her head to drop onto my shoulder. We walked on.

We passed a mini-playground. Well, actually, we just passed a see-saw in a small sand pit in between the pavement and the road. Cecelia raised her head up at the sight of it. She turned her face, cheeks glistening with tears, up to mine. She held me tightly, and steered us to walk onto the sand, taking off her shoes. In a tiny 10-metre round, we circled the sand pit, listening to the soft crunch of sand beneath our feet, imagining the sea next to us, a doomed maritime wedding. A cat sauntered past, heading up the hill towards a small laneway. I felt Cecelia tug at my hand, and we left the sand pit, and the see saw, to follow the cat down to the lane branching off Emerald Hill.

“I think, the problem is I’ve got habits I can’t get rid of. I don’t really enjoy smoking, but I do so anyway. And it’s probably killing me…and the drinking, and going home at night, I could do with sleeping under a bridge, you know?”

She beseeched me with her eyes. I pretended to examine the ground, octagonal stones and green grass and brown dirt.

“There’s a story, about a woman who falls in love with anyone who saves her falling off a cliff, I forget the details. The point is, it could have been a tramp, or a politician, or a celebrity, or a horticulturalist, that saved her, and she would have fallen in love regardless. I think we need some kind of adversity in our lives. We need the threat of falling off a cliff, physically. Like how people go on holidays where the main idea isn’t relaxation, but the feeling of life being threatened, by, say malaria, or a tiger attack, food poisoning, robbing. You know, thrill seeking.”

She continued. We were now walking parallel to Emerald Hill, towards Cairnhill Circle again. To our left were the back doors to the terrace houses. To our right, past a wire fence, was the Central Expressway, brightly lit, streaming with taxis. The expressway led to a wide tunnel beneath Cairnhill Circle. I held Cecelia’s hand. She squeezed it tight. A light breeze blew across her face. Cecelia’s face, dimly lit, with two black shadows for eyes, and pale, glowing, skin like a lantern.

We came to a stairway, and staggered up. I noticed the clicking of her heels had stopped, and saw she had no shoes. “I threw them away,” she said, “I didn’t really like them.”

We followed the pavement along Cairnhill Circle up towards the Central Expressway exit, stopping at a ladder leading down to a metal platform jutting out above the tunnel. We climbed down the ladder, hobbled along the platform to the rectangular holes cut into the concrete, each about a comfortable length for us to lie down, to the last one, covered by a tarpaulin, and sat, wrapped in each others arms.  Hanging above the expressway, we heard every single car amplified to deafening levels from the tunnel. It was beautiful. Yellow, white and blue taxis streamed towards us on our right, and away from us on the left, bordered by the wire fence and the terrace houses from our route before, now shrouded in darkness.

Cecelia moved to lie down, slotting her legs behind me. I turned to her, and she stared back. And then she grinned. I lay down next to her, slipping my arm under her waist, as she said to me, weakly, “How did we come to this?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, losing myself in her eyes. She had the look of a teenager about to step off a ledge; wild, helpless and defiant. I told her to shut her eyes, and started to undress her.

From beneath the tarpaulin I pulled out a plastic bag, and unwrapped a six-inch chef’s knife. I traced the knife down her body, clavicle to torso, watching her skin shiver under the metal, and then I stabbed it in, cold and hard. She barely made a sound. And as I twisted the blade into her belly, I moved my mouth up to kiss her as she gasped for air, pulling my tongue into her mouth. I felt her shoulders twitch, and I tugged the blade up to her stomach, cutting through gut, kidney, and liver, and pushed it in again, curving upwards towards her lungs. Cecelia, dear Cecelia, made to scream, so I wrapped my other hand round her throat, squeezing it gently so a light wheezing came out instead, eventually followed by gurgling, blood bubbling out of her mouth. Her hands were flailing about, one onto metal, the other onto concrete. Blood stains were decorating the wall, and tiny droplets fell from the platform onto the expressway below. I briefly wondered if the blood would stain any windshields, and of the drivers’ reaction. Would he, or she, use the wipers and water to clean it off? Or leave it there, unnoticed, till the next carwash? Would they think the blood came from the sky, or from the ceiling of the tunnel?

Cecelia’s eyes lost the panic and twitching of impending death. They slowed down and found a certain peace in emptiness. Her gurgling stopped, and her mouth gaped open, perfect and silent. I rolled up the blood filled tarpaulin, and changed out of my red-stained office clothes, pulling on a polo shirt and Bermudas. Clean and stainless, I started to leave, but turned back to retrieve her cigarettes from her handbag: Virginia Slims, menthol.

Climbing from the top of the tunnel, I re-entered Cairnhill Circle and crossed the road, heading towards Newton Circus. Taxis zipped past me as I walked past Peck Hay Road, trees and condominiums towering over me. A dark, skinny construction worker, dressed loosely in a singlet and shorts, talking rapidly into an ancient phone, strode past me and nodded hello. I took out Cecelia’s cigarette case. For some reason, I rarely ever smoke menthols. For some reason, it felt like a good idea. I lighted Cecelia’s cigarette, taking a long, hard, drag. She said life comes out of adversity. I guess I went too far. I always go too far.

- Andrew Cheah, March 2009

My housemate has stolen my rosary. Not only that, he’s also left all the taps running. The cereal box is filled with cat litter, the kitchen sink is plugged up with a condom, and the bathroom walls are coated with hair. When I walk around the house, I have to look out for thumb tacks strewn about the floor, not helped by the copious amounts of vegetable oil he’s unleashed in a swastika pattern in the lounge, stretching from the TV, now turned into a fishbowl, to the couch, now hollowed out to an eskie storing half finished cans of beer and tepid lukewarm water. The walls have been vandalised with lipstick, drawing out various civil engineering concepts and hypothetical supply and demand graphs for clip-on razors for pink iPod nanos. His room, well, what used to be his room, smells strongly of cloves and cinnamon. In fact, the smell is so strong the entire house smells of it. I’m walking round a property that stinks like a holistic spa, and there’s only one person to blame.

I enter his room and, of course, it’s blacked out by aluminium foil on the windows. There’s aluminium foil everywhere, with a little alfoil bowl in the middle presenting what must be three kilograms of cloves. I crunch my way towards the bowl; it’s still burning. The cloves, some black as night, some glowing orange beneath the blanket of spice. I go to the kitchen to grab a towel to pick up the bowl, and find they’re all gone. I’m not surprised, really. I look out the window and see the towels haphazardly stuck onto what best can be described as a monument. I cautiously step outside.

The monument, first things first, is…I think it’s a fat man. It’s covered with the towels, and a good deal of grass, evidently coming from the backyard; someone’s gone and cut the grass, all of it. There must be about a hundred pairs of scissors littering the ground, some stabbed haphazardly into the only tree. The poor tree. Crucifixion would have been better. There are flags, British, French, Czech, Turkish, Chinese, Egyptian, Malaysian, Israeli, hanging limp off its branches. I notice a slipper nailed into the fence, my slipper, with a grocery list carved into the sole, badly, presumably with a pair of scissors.

I hate my housemate. This is just one of his ‘installations’. He does it alone, you know, and completely silently. I know this because he’s done it before while I’d be sitting at home reading a book. And I know for a fact he doesn’t have any friends. How could he? I mean, he’s crazy. He’s like a ninja with the wrong personality disorder. But ninjas don’t smell of cloves, and they don’t steal your clothes and replace them with ill-fitting Teletubby suits. Ninjas don’t rearrange all the keys on your keyboard, and steal your email account password to email your girlfriend recipes for steak and recommendations for circumcision centres in New York, Budapest, Paris, Rabat and Cape Town. Ninjas especially don’t leave bright red footprints on your ceiling while casting superglue coated M&Ms onto your bed to ‘enhance the effect of the swirl of the shadows of the moon of the elephant of the venison humpback rider of the far east’. Whatever.

The man’s replaced my shaving cream with whipped cream, my whipped cream with beer, my beer with Pepsi, my Pepsi with Coke, my Coke with tea, my tea with coffee, my coffee with brown sugar, my brown sugar with white sugar, my white sugar with flour, my flour with talcum powder, my talcum powder with sulphur, my sulphur with cous cous, my cous cous with rice, my rice with breadcrumbs, my breadcrumbs with fried onions, my fried onions with fried garlic, my fried garlic with chalk, my chalk with permanent markers, my permanent markers with glue sticks, my glue sticks with pens, my pens with pencils, my pencils with crayons, my crayons with laser pointers, my laser pointers with paper weights, and my paper weights with shaving cream.

What a fucker.

His name’s Boaz by the way.

I’m a pregnant woman at a cocktail party,

I’m a pregnant woman at a cocktail party,

I’m a pregnant woman at a cocktail party,

How in the world can this happen to be?

- Twenty-two

It’s seven months later and I’m still chasing my housemate for my rosary. That is how it could happen to be. I’ve tracked him down to this party in the hills, run by the elite of society. I have to say, it’s quite a treat to be here. The main room is lit by a brilliant chandelier, hanging above a long table with every single article of finger food imaginable. There’s sausages, caviar, blue cheese, Swiss cheese, fondue, strawberries, sushi, sashimi, octopus, salmon, tuna, swordfish, Peking duck, scallops, smoked chicken, kiwifruit, dragonfruit, coconut, coconut juice, tiramisu, brownies, biscuits, olives… I could go on for ages. The sandwich bar was a tiny room by itself. And the cocktail bar, well, suffice to say it had everything. Margaritas, Hurricanes, Coolers, Singapore Slings, Daiquiris, Martinis, Caipirinhas, Screwdrivers….going from red to green to blue to yellow, to gold and violet, shimmering and refracting invitingly like a psychedelic mirage.

“Good evening colonel,” I greet the big man in green, “having a good night?”

“Splendid, splendid,” he says, in a voice disconcertingly squeaky considering his bulk and rank in the army, “I’m having a whale of a time. And you, my dear lady?”

I take a sip out of the tequila sunrise and place my other hand on my pregnant belly. “Absolutely marvellous, Colonel. It’s an effort not to devour all the food and drink all the alcohol”, I declare, “I do thank you for inviting me!”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. It’s a pleasure to be in the company of a woman as strikingly beautiful as you,“ he says, with a twitch of his moustache.

I laugh softly, graciously draining the last of my cocktail and grabbing a tray of ham sandwiches from the table. I’m so fucking hungry. “Oh, you flatter me, Colonel, you really do. One can only wonder at the number of fair maidens you have bedded in your lifetime.”

As the Colonel ever so slightly tickles my pregnant belly, I catch a whiff of cloves in the air. That despicably sweet smell, like a lizard dipped in chocolate, permeating itself across the main hall. I devour another ham sandwich in rage and place the half-eaten tray of sandwiches in the outstretched arms of the Colonel. I spy his moustache twitch in military surprise, and beeline my way towards the cocktail bar.

The cocktail party is stuffed to the corners with a tiny population of peculiar characters. The Colonel, quite obviously, being one of them. There are others, too. Between me and the cocktail bar, there’s a woman dressed like the sphinx, with her boyfriend the Empire State Building, some idiot with a doughnut stuck onto his cheek and right wrist, another one dangling red yellow blue rubber balls from his neck, presumably to match his ridiculous sunglasses, yellow and red and green like a confused traffic light. To add on, there’s a guy whom for all intents and purposes looks like an orthodox Jew, a man in full Hawaiian getup, his wife the Pineapple, and a dapper-looking Englishman, monocle and top hat included, chatting with a skinny jeaned man with severe glasses, wearing a shirt with the word “FASCIST” emblazoned onto the front in courier type.

I push my way between the Fascist and the Englishman, belly leading the way, with blind determination, grasping a Bloody Mary, and draining its contents in four gulps. I turn around and the Fascist is staring at me, severe looking glasses encasing a pair of stupid looking blue eyeballs. I restrain myself from laughing, concentrating instead on the stench of cloves spreading itself about the room like airborne leprosy. I tightly flash my two front teeth at the fascist, turning to leave, and catch my belly in the waistcoat of the Englishman.

The Englishman, he’s wearing a top hat with an emerald green, lightning blue feather on top, a black waistcoat, with white trousers and a white collarless shirt, and is holding a pair of black felt gloves in his right hand, a Tia Maria on his left. I stare dumbly at the crumples in his shirt, and shift my gaze upwards to his monocled, clean-shaven, pencil-browed, brown-eyed, sharp-nosed face. The Englishman returns my stare with a blank gaze, cosmic in its emptiness, and I think I’m in love.

“Are you really a fascist?” I blurt out. There is an awkward silence, and the Fascist sticks his pale freckled face with the bovine eyeballs into the conversation, explaining in rapid-fire jagged English that he’s not really a fascist. Not quite. Not a fascist at all to tell you the truth. He only wears the shirt to be ironic, to make a humourous statement in a party as diverse as this.

He’s got a point, I’m thinking, imagining myself and my gigantic belly and my gigantic daisy chain pregnancy skirt through someone else’s eyes. The Fascist doesn’t stop, he just keeps talking. He wants to know if I like Virginia Woolf, if I share with him a fascination with Russian culture, if I have a strong opinion on the films of Almodovar. He wants to know if I believe in the unifying power of religion, if I understand the political ramifications of Charlotte’s Web and if I agree with his judgment of a tenuous, at best, connection between that book and the military conquests of Alexander the Great. The Fascist shows me a Live Strong wristband, with the ‘LiveStrong’ crossed out and replaced with an ‘I heart Ass’. I introduce myself, and wait for a normal reply.

“My name is Jeremy, and this is my friend Giles Thomas Orford Berry. I am thinking very seriously of planting vegetables in my backyard. Maybe I’ll start with lettuce and go on to spinach and sprouts and beans. I don’t trust vegetables from the supermarket, or even the market, anymore. You never know what’s been drowned in pesticides or what’s been genetically engineered. It’s just not right to eat, say, a tomato, of the size that you see these days. Years ago, you could’ve gotten vegetables at cheaper prices, and not have to worry about them being dipped in chemicals or made to have redder or greener by a man or woman with sterilised tweezers and forceps. Years ago we could’ve prevented global warming.”

Giles Thomas Orford Berry, bless him, is completely immobile.

“Pretty crazy party hey?” I ask.

Giles Thomas Orford Berry parts his lips.

“Yes,” he pronounces.

I stand there, me and my pregnant belly, nodding like a lucky charm, waiting for more.

I venture, “So what do you do?”

“I work in an art gallery.”

“Oh? A curator?”

“Yes. But I’m more of a guard. I direct people around and make sure they don’t do anything against the rules.”

“I think I’ve seen you at work!” interjects the Fascist, “it’s the one museum where there’s this piece where the UV rays shine on the drawing depicting monks copulating with Jesus while George Bushes and Ghandis dance a jig in stereoscopic stickers placed in the periphery.”

“Yes,” says Giles Thomas Orford Berry.

“That sounds like it’s worth a look!,” I laugh. “What other pieces are there in the gallery?” I thrust my belly into his crotch.

“I don’t know.”

I momentarily look past Giles Thomas Orford Berry’s shoulder, and catch an orthodox Jew glaring at me, bowler hat and dirty white beard, mouth agape, his yellow teeth and purple tongue mocking me from afar. And then it dawns on me, the man dressed as an orthodox Jew is Boaz. Boaz, running around, cloves in pocket, chewing on erasers, replacing cranberry juice with rose syrup.

I glance around and, true enough, some faces appear to be happily dissatisfied with their drinks. I drain my Appletini; it’s fine, at least. I ask distractedly, staring back at Boaz, “Do you look at the artworks much?”

“No.”

The Fascist asks, smacking his lips, “Are you alright?”

Boaz knows I’ve recognised him. He begins to make a move. My resolve tightening, I drain my Bloody Mary, grab a plate of cold Ramen, balance it on my belly, and snatch a Pina Colade from the Fascist.

I explain quickly, smiling quickly at Giles Thomas Orford Berry, “That man there, dressed like an orthodox Jew, used to be my housemate. He’s stolen my rosary, and he’s doing something devious with the cocktails.”

“You mean he’s not a Jew?” cries the Fascist, facetiously.

Giles Thomas Orford Berry’s pretty mouth gurgles out a chuckle, as I push my way past the Fascist towards Boaz and his obscene disguise, drinking and eating simultaneously. Boaz runs through the swinging doors that lead towards the kitchen. I clobber my way after him, shoving lizards, gentlemen, pineapples, Indians, ladies, and virgins out of my way.

Leaving a stream of multilingual vulgarities in my wake, I enter the kitchen, where the servants point towards the pantry in unison. I fling the pantry doors open, and Boaz is hunched in the corner, clutching a fish.

“Where did you get that from?” I yell.

“Not from here!” Boaz screams, slapping me full in the face with a freshly scaled salmon.

I hit the ground dazed. Spitting out a molar, holding my belly, I stand up and give chase to my ex-housemate back to the party. A pathway amongst the guests presents itself, a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the man dressed as a Jew. Taking the path, I run belly-first into the errant Pineapple, whom proceeds to vomit her cocktail onto my dress. As she apologises, I look to the path, and notice Giles Thomas Orford Berry, at the other end of the room, sucking face with the Fascist. Two slugs in coital bliss.

I feel a welling-up in my stomach, and I push the Pineapple to the ground and straddle her, as I release pasta, sushi, ramen, ham, rye, pickles, chilli sauce, Ribena, milk, ginger ale, green tea, olives, cherries, vodka, champagne, rum, whiskey and whatever else I’ve ingested onto her screaming face.

I resume the chase, staggering past the shell-shocked and nauseous crowd, and the two enthusiastic lovers, making my way to the open side door where the Jew had disappeared.

On exiting the mansion, a wave of calmness washes over me. The claustrophobia and chatter of the crowd fades away as I limp around a dark, silent garden, accompanied by crickets and owls, and the exotic stench of cloves. I retrieve a tiny pistol from my bra, and commence searching for Boaz.

It’s a cold night, and the frost scrunches under my feet. My eyes adjust to the darkness, and the image of dark green foliage and silvery white frost, illuminated by a full moon, resolves. I follow the trail of cloves into an enclave of white-barked eucalyptus trees, and there I see a silhouette of Boaz, sitting cross-legged on a ball-shaped shrub.

I tighten my grip on the pistol, and scrunch my way towards him. Boaz looks up and drops something from his mouth. I point the pistol directly at my ex-housemate.

“What have you done with my rosary?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answers in mild panic.

I’m tired, pregnant, hungry, cold, covered in vomit, and at a loss for words. I stand completely still, continuing to aim the pistol at him. Boaz cautiously reaches for his beard, and pulls out an eraser, which he places in his mouth. And then he starts chewing. We remain at this stalemate for about, oh, two minutes, and then I relent and lower the pistol. I feel an inexplicable warmth creep up on me, and I flutter my eyelids as a sharp little kick drums from within the hollow of my belly.

- Andrew Cheah, September 2008

The Chicken

You wake up, and you’re staring at the canopy of a rainforest, the bright morning sunlight filtering light green and yellow upon the damp forest floor. Brown-golden leaves, small and large, float down slowly, lightly spinning like synchronised swimmers across your eyes. The ground beneath you feels soft and cool, as faint sweet smells tickle your nostrils in the still air. The distant echo of a tree falling reverberates in the distance, the insistent drone of a multitude of insects fills your ears, and the birds are singing Hare Krishna.

You pick yourself up and dust off, blearily regaining your bearings. Yes, you really are in a rainforest. There’s the trees, endlessly, permanently, punctuating the landscape of even more trees and the columns of light from above shifting languidly, continuing on into the distance. You watch a caterpillar steal his way across the forest floor, arching his back upwards to push its head forwards, up and down, left to right, two solid motions, going at a blazing five centimetres a second. You wonder to yourself why other caterpillars do not adopt such an efficient and fast method of self-transportation. Why they insist on the all-to-common wave motion of the conventional caterpillar. Will evolution eventually favour these faster caterpillars? All these questions, like the blip of human life in eternity, fade into the ether as the enormity of existence takes over.

Gradually, the realisation dawns on you that you’re naked, which you’d think would soon register into slight alarm with the idea that you have no clue where you are, what you’re doing in a rainforest, or how you got there. But you feel calm and free, like the leaves that filter down from the heavens in their spinning elliptical trajectories. You think about how the leaves, once a vital part of a tree, will rot away, to form part of the soil that eventually helps to sustain the trees. You think about the caterpillar, munching away on the leaves, to become a butterfly that flutters from flower to flower, spreading the seeds of life.

And the birds. They’re still singing Hare Krishna, which slowly becomes louder in relation to the tropical insect drone. You take two steps forward, and find it becomes softer. Is the birdsong coming from a particular direction? Calmly, you turn around, padding your way over earth, grass and tree root towards the singing.

There is something strange going on here. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. The thought that some kind of trap awaits you crosses your mind. But the tune, and the birds’ performance of it, is so perfect that you tell yourself that if something were to happen, if your worst fears about being ambushed in the jungle were true, then it would be worth it just for being able to listen to the birdsong. In effect, it’s really a four note tune, sung by a multitude of birds in perfect unison. A choir of birds, all singing in a particular overtone. Some sing complicated variations of the four notes, others sing the basics, and some hum a sustained drone beneath the layers of chirping. The birdsong reverberates off the trees.

As you continue walking, the birdsong rises in volume, till you come to a ring of white and pink flowers, bordering a tiny flat clearing, whereupon a lone chicken stands cluelessly. The choir of birds has stopped, while a solo bird chitters away random rhythmic and melodic variations of the main tune. You look up and can just barely see a lightning blue and yellow bird near the canopy, spot-lit by a single beam of light in parallel with the tree trunks. It focuses into the clearing, directly onto the chicken, which attempts to cluck out a song in emulation of the heavenly one being sung above.

For the first time, you feel a light breeze brush across the forest floor and your body. A light rustle emanates from the forest floor, and you can hear the trees softly creaking. You think to yourself: What should I do with the chicken? Should I…chase it? Pick it up, and then pet it, comfort it, and feed it? Maybe I should eat it? Should I keep it, and find it a mate, so I could produce more chickens for food and companionship? That would mean I have to farm them, and thus enclose them within a fence. Maybe I should I ignore the chicken totally and find myself a loyal dog, or, if needing food, search for a bigger challenge in a goat, if at all possible? Could the chicken act as bait for bigger and better meaty treats?

You decide to catch the chicken first, and then decide what to do with it later. The chicken looks so dim, it doesn’t seem to understand the dilemma going through your head. You try and think about how you would go about killing the chicken, while at the same time fantasizing about picking it up, tickling it, petting it, and letting it roam wild, to return to you at night. Standing outside the ring of flowers, you try clucking at the chicken, hoping the chicken would come to you, but it doesn’t. It just stares back with that blank helpless look particular to flightless birds.

Helpless, however, this chicken is not. You try to chase after the bird, but it’s a fast runner, you keep finding yourself clutching at thin air as the chicken clucks itself away and around the circle. You think of the other animals in the rainforest staring at you, this new inexperienced animal chasing after a chicken. How do the other animals do it? It looks so easy on National Geographic. How do you capture a chicken? You just catch it! Easy as pie. Easy as pimento encrusted pretzel mini treats. You silently curse television as you make a desperate dive towards the bird, which screams and flies a foot in the air as you fall flat on your face.

Why won’t the chicken just come to me, you think to yourself. You’re not exactly a threat. In fact, all you want to do now is pet it. Midway through your in-jungle acrobatics you decide on becoming a vegetarian. Meat is just too difficult, and too cute. You stare back the chicken, clucking away, and turn over the look at the forest canopy. The bird is still going at it, but seems to have been joined by another one of the same plumage, singing the exact same song, harmonising perfectly with the first singer. You think of life as perfection, of creating perfection by changing perfection. The sun still filters down, the leaves still sail across the air, and the birds are still singing Hare Krishna. Suddenly, you hear a clucking next to your ear, as the chicken climbs up onto your chest and sits there, still clucking its imperfect imitation of the birdsong above.

As you lie in your sun-lit circle of flowers, you and your chicken, the forest opens up, the breeze comes through, and your brain, your skin, your ears, your eyes, sense it all, all of it, everything. You close your eyes, and chemicals are released in your brain, firing synapses, sending messages to your face, and tightening your cheek muscles, as a slow, weary and content grin crosses your face.

The Camel

George William Scott had seen mirages before. The scorching desert air bending light rays from the sky to imprint pools of shivering blue on the blinding sand. And right before him was a veritable sea of blue pools, just out of reach, just a few miles down, a direction to nowhere. He knew where he was, he was in the Sahara, in what the Berbers call a sand lake. All around him was sand, on dunes, on peaks, in valleys, blinking and reflecting yellow strobe at the blue sky. This much he was sure of. What George William Scott had trouble processing, however, was the camel standing to his right.

He reached out and touched it. It felt real. He poked it, and it made a braying sound between a burp and a fart. He leant on the camel and inspected it. It looked as camels do; one hump, long neck, furry hooves, mutated horse mouth, and eyes caught between evil and stupidity. The fur was warm, but everything else was warm. George wondered how the camel had just suddenly appeared next to him, practically silent till he had decided to poke it. Was this a good sign? That salvation was near? Or was he seeing, hearing and feeling things? George took a sip from his remaining water bottle as the camel, tiring of having George lean on it, stepped forward for George to fall into the sand.

As George struggled back up, he noticed the camel was still there, staring at him, a grotesque appendage rising from the desert sand. The gods of desolation deigned to provide a warm, sand filled breeze for our unfortunate traveller and his newfound companion, sapping water and blurring vision, while the camel shuffled and grunted. George took another sip of water and soldiered on to the next dune, taking care to avoid the wind-facing side, with the camel following.

George had been here before. As a child he had been involved in a minor air crash with his parents, leaving them stuck in the desert to be rescued three hours later by men in strange dresses in tanks. The impracticalities of his memory of the experience were not lost on George’s mind, as he pondered to himself if he really was in the Sahara before, or not. It could have been in the war, but his age when first stranded and stranded now did not match up to any form of desert fighting. But he had been here before, and George in his delirium knew for sure that he had seen this particular dune before, with its slowly drifting sand peeking out from the top and drifting down to his bare feet.

He saw the camel behind him stop suddenly. George drained what was left of his water bottle and wondered why he was still walking, why he was in the desert, and why he was leading the camel, which itself led to a multitude of other questions involving the existence of the camel. George knew that only he could answer such questions, being the only person he could ask. Is this what happens in real life? Are we fooling ourselves into thinking that the questions that drive us and keep us alive are answerable through discussion, through imparted experiences of others? Everything we see and feel in life is a distortion of everything else, and when we share it, we distort it some more, Chinese whispers across the dunes.

George fell back and landed on the side of the camel, which had in the meantime sat down, a cushion for our wearied desert trekker. But we always need someone to rely on, thought George, as he patted the camel and the silver tap sticking out of its hump. Life by yourself is a desert, and if you fail to discuss the impossible with someone else, you will fall into the hot soup. George did not want to move anymore, and he waited for death to arrive as he slowly baked in the sun, while the camel tried to make the silver tap sticking out of its hump attract his attention.

There is a long and illustrious history of stories involving animals that talk, generally called fables, with morals and all. This camel did not talk, but it did shift uncomfortably, and the main character did not listen, and continued on his own private monologue, looking out onto the dunes that rise, and fall, and rise again, like gigantic waves in a storm, captured still in an oil painting.

The desert, through George’s dehydrated state, began to take on the magical properties of poetry. The mirages still shivered and shimmered in the distance, the sky retained its blinding blue and the beige of the sand, like a rising tide, slowly covered George’s ankles. George shifted his feet, watching the sand move along with his toes, and then turned his attention to the horizon, with the mirages, forever existing, forever unreachable. Is life all about the chasing of images till we die, he thought to himself, or is life about the contentment of never reaching the mirages, till we die without ever moving?

For the first time, George noticed the small traces of life in the desert, a beetle scurried across the hot sand, a tiny breeze started a barely audible rustle of a bush, and the camel stabbed a silver tap in its hump painfully into George’s hip. George stared dumbly at the tap, gradually re-discovering the camel’s existence. He remembered the face, that stupid-looking face, the hoarse sounds, the evil fur, and the smell like a dying horse. And now he’s looking at a tap.

Or maybe some of the mirages are not actually mirages? Could they actually signify water? It only takes one out of a million mirages to be worth the walk, and if I die, then I will die trying. But then, there’s this tap. Maybe, just maybe, sometimes salvation needs to come to you. I can look for my water, but chasing it results in failure. I have to want something, and need it, and I have to go for it, but directly running after something will only cause it to flee. And here I am, almost dead, after an eternity of chasing illusions, with a tap in a camel that just came out of nowhere.

George, half dazed expression on his face, reached for the tap, and twisted the handle. The camel grunted, the hump rumbled, and the tap released a steady stream of sand. George stared in a mixture of disbelief and amazement, and knelt by the camel, body hung up by his shoulders, as the tap gushed out its torrent of sand that engulfed our lone desert traveller, dehydrated, dead still, and limp. Near the end, George stared up at the perfect blue sky, empty and blinding, as the sand began to submerge his face, as his nostrils, taking their last breath, flared sand into the air, and the heat robbed him of his very last ounce of moisture, leaving him a dried shell of a life that once lived.

How did I even get here?

The Cow

I’m a floating speck of something in a black and white void, caught in a shattered chessboard while the pieces move in inexplicable orbits. I’d close my eyes, but that just makes the outlines brighter. When I move, particles of dust splatter about, and it feels like disconnects are forming where my body used to be. Flashes of dark blue and green flutter in the distance, together with a low rumble that seems to come from far away, but from everywhere at the same time. The pieces of white and black disintegrate into tiny particles, and join with me into a silent, calm, whirlwind as everything sublimes into monochromatic stripes that tremble with the rumbles from everywhere.

The rumbles, like waterfalls of cinder, slowly distinguish themselves into some kind of rhythm, rising in volume at some points, going softer in others. With this, the stripes begin to throb, and soon separate themselves into particles and triangles, alternating between black and white, permanently in opposition. I find myself spinning in more chaos, with the only constant being a small white square in the centre of my vision, growing minutely, slowly consuming the monochromatic storm around it, till it eventually reaches me and all goes white.

White flips to black, and black flips to white, and I begin to pull away to see rows upon rows of white rectangles alternating with black moving upwards, similar to a railway line. It is now completely silent. The triangles, unlike the rectangles, stay with me, lightly bobbing and spinning in set positions forming a kind of cocoon. I still have no body. And I can’t tell if I’m moving with the triangles, or if the rectangles are moving upwards, or downwards, or sideways, seeing as I cant tell what’s upright either.

All around me, past the lights, past the triangles, through patches of black and within circles of white, the green and blue flashes have subsumed into gridlines, curving elegantly like sine waves. It all looks mathematical: Triangles, lines, sine waves, black and white, and blue and green. White particles floating in blackness attach themselves to the skeletal framework, as the blackness resolves into more triangles as the white reforms into the same, swallowing the rectangles and moving steadily to attach together, forming little spikes frozen in time and space.

By now, the green and blue have disappeared, and all I see is black and white again. I can only see white movement against the black patches, and black movement against the white patches. The particles have come in again, and almost act as glue for the spikes as more triangles accumulate around them; black particles swim towards white spikes, and then white triangles attach themselves to the spikes as the white particles all but disappear, leaving behind a seamless white surface. Between the spikes, the remaining white and black particles flow together in a grey river, gradually slowing down into an almost-stationary glacier, a surface between the white spikes, short and minute, gigantic and towering, that jut obtusely out of the landscape, as plumes of black particles shoot up above to create a black sky, embellished by smaller plumes of white ones diving into the glacier in contrasting spirals of white.

The rumbling starts again, this time louder than ever before, causing tiny ripples to appear in the glacier, changing the flow of the plumes of particles, and causing the spikes to morph in place, commencing a slow dance in the world, in time to the steady rises and falls in the volume and attack of the rumbling. From behind the largest spike in the distance, a swarm of aqua blue triangles rush towards me, enveloping me briefly and painlessly, forming a humanoid body of perpendicularly arranged jagged shapes to call my own. My new body, much like the landscape, morphs and vibrates within its humanoid shape in rhythm to the rest of the world.

It dawns on me that the rumbling sounds that have been a constant since the beginning, and providing the rhythm for everything in this world, have been coming from the direction of the tallest spike. My interest piqued, I half-walk, half-float above angular white peaks and plumes of white particles towards the origin of the rumblings.

Floating closer, I notice tiny green cubes and triangles dancing in the air, held up by absolutely nothing, an atmosphere of clarity. I try to touch one but simply float through, and as the rumblings rise in volume with proximity, I see even more of them, finding myself floating through a veritable jungle of green shapes. And then, suddenly, the air becomes clear again.

I’m standing in a grey, rippling clearing, surrounded by a soft, swaying wall of green, and a world’s worth of paper-thin peaks and valleys. Before me, a shimmering quadruped of emerald green shuffles across the lightly heaving grey surface. Like me, the quadruped is made up of triangles, that morph and vibrate in time its own rumbling. The differences lie in the colour, emerald green, and its emanation of light.

The quadruped positively shines green, glimmering as it shuffles across the ground, head down, angles attacking the surface and consuming up portions of the ground, producing the rumbling sound i’d been hearing since the beginning. The quadruped constantly shoots out from any angle of its body a green triangle or cube, and occasionally a grouping of blue triangles that float upwards briefly before speeding off to some unknown destination in the distance.

I watch the quadruped for a good long while, and then observe my surroundings change, as other blue-polygon beings float about, and the green figures disperse further out into the world. I lie down and stare at the black sky and the plumes of white particles, as one, three, five, seven, of them stop and hang still in the air to sparkle like diamonds in the twilight. I close my eyes and breath in, and out, and in, and out, letting myself melt into the crunching insistent rhythm of the earth.

- Andrew Cheah, July 2008

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You imply to me: My shiny blue aluminium wrapper will stop you from getting to me. I say back to you: That’s a negative answer, my dearest chocolate bar. You imply to me: I taste like heaven. One bite and you’ll be back in primary school racing paper boats down storm drains, one bite and you’ll forget about the disappointments of life, of dropping the delicious scoop of ice cream in front of your best friend and having him laugh at you because it was funny and there’s ice cream on your shoes. One bite, and you’ll forget about your seven year plan, and the feeling that you may have found yourself on the cliche path of fat men in black suits, empty suitcases and emptier mouths, and a computer that never works, and the sinking spinning feeling of drowning in a lake of jargon, as the rules of the world close in like iron bars bursting from the ground. One bite, and for a moment, just a moment, you’ll live life at it’s own time, when all there is milk and chocolate and wafer swirling and mixing and sensations shooting up to your brain and exploding in candy coloured fireworks.

And I could have you two at a time. Or I could have you each on your own. And I could eat you quickly, or do it slow, and all will remain is me.

Just me.

And as your shiny blue wrapper flutters down the street, under a bus, between a couple, past a baby and into a drain, I will stroll into the park, and I will think about climbing a tree. And I will think about never coming back down.

- Andrew Cheah, March 2008

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The remaining light of the heavy clammy evening drained single-mindedly into the horizon, as the streetlights flickered into existence once again; the world’s all-too-human desire to reverse the inevitable, in any way possible. The prophet, sandals on railing, lounged impassively on the balcony of his dilapidated mansion, presiding the roadside trees turn from orange-black silhouettes to individually grotesque bottom-lit trunks embellished by softly rustling leaves. A lone solitary figure lording over a decaying quiet street, soft and weary brown eyes burdened by years of madness, stroking his beard with one hand, turning a box of matches with the other.

The prophet wore aviator sunglasses, now perched precariously on his forehead. His hair was black and knotted and hung down to his waist in irregularly formed dreadlocks. His beard followed suit, but curiously was not as black as his head hair. His beard hair was sprinkled with the odd white strand, lending the prophet the look of a construction worker that had remembered to cover his head and hair but not his beard. He had well formed, calloused hands that corresponded with a slightly crooked nose and strong, long legs, belonging to a pair of feet decorated with numerous scars. The prophet wore a simple brown robe that had quite visibly not been washed in years, along with its owner. The robe was almost a large rag-towel, with tears and threads extending from its many corners. The robe’s owner himself had the aura of small black insects constantly circling and jumping off him, and as the owner brushed away a fly from his knee, he got up unsteadily from his rocking chair and ambled into his mansion, fingers and matchbox twitching expectantly.

He navigated soundlessly through his pitch-black mansion, knowing every corner, loose floorboard, and leak by memory. With only the irregular dripping of the rainwater from the day before as his accompaniment, the prophet descended the staircase, heading further into the dank blackness of his mansion. He stood in the kitchen and struck a match, bathing the pantry in a weak yellow light, which slowly and steadily searched out an irregular shape of tarnished silver. The prophet picked up the oil lamp and blew out the match. Again in darkness, he blindly refilled the lamp with oil from the top shelf of the pantry without spilling a drop, then struck another match to light the lamp.

The light from the lamp illuminated the entire kitchen, and as the prophet stepped towards another cupboard, door hanging by just one hinge, the house seemed to warm again. It was a deep warmth, a warmth that came from a long forgotten memory, a memory that preceded even its bearers’ entry into this world. But still, it was only from a small lamp that the prophet carried, and the prophet had only just begun, continuing on to illuminate his mansion with the light of the world. He took a bag of twelve candles from the kitchen cupboard, and made his way to the first bedroom.

There were twelve bedrooms in the prophet’s mansion. It was a large, double storey, wood board affair, built in 1936 by a Chinese entrepreneur, whom had committed suicide in the 70s, abandoning the mansion to rot. When the prophet, destitute and homeless, first climbed into the mansion, it was through the first bedroom window. Evidently, he was not the first, as the first bedroom was in the worst state of all the areas of the mansion, with obscene graffiti staining all the walls, of which the wallpaper had already been removed. Syringes, knives and crockery littered the floor, topped off by the odd rat carcass. There was no furniture, save for one bedside table, on which there stood a candleholder, in which the prophet carefully placed one candle, which he subsequently lit.

Much like the first bedroom, the second bedroom was a scene taken from the end of the world. Being the only other bedroom on the ground floor that faced the street, the second bedroom was subjected to the same abuse granted to all the most easily accessible rooms of any abandoned mansion. The prophet walked amongst the ash, dead rats and broken glass of the second bedroom to the windowsill, where he placed another lit candle.

The third, fourth and fifth bedrooms were the last three bedrooms on the ground floor. They were not, as the first and second bedrooms, ransacked and left for dead. Instead they seemed to be used as storerooms by the entrepreneur before his suicide. Each room looked out to the backyard, but the view obscured by overgrown Bougainvillea bushes, and thus the third, fourth and fifth bedrooms were probably the darkest in the entire mansion.

A steady warm light illuminated mountains of collected trash from yesteryear. The prophet, oil lamp in hand, made his way through a wilderness of porcelain cupid dolls, lamp shades of all shapes, sizes and colours, old magazines, broken televisions and radios, unused lanterns and exploded firecrackers, to light the third candle. The fourth bedroom held piles upon piles of bedsheets and blankets. Some were plain white, some had patterns, and some had drawings, of the solar system, cats and dogs, dolphins, cows and stars, all of which dancing an endless dance with no one to snuggle to for the rest of eternity. The prophet lit the fourth candle. The fifth bedroom contained a chandelier to the left of the door, and piles of family portraits to the right. The portraits bore the distinctive characteristic of old pictures; of appearing to examine the viewer, rather than the viewer examining them. They consisted entirely of individual and group portraits of the Chinese entrepreneur and his family. They looked out onto the flickering shadows of the fifth bedroom with unending love and sadness. The prophet, as before, entered the room and lit the fifth candle without stopping, having already examined the contents of the room years before.

Local legend tells that the Chinese entrepreneur used to be the richest man in all the land. Unfortunately, he contracted a mysterious incurable disease that seemed to make his body waste and atrophy before his own and his family’s eyes. His wife and his children left him, and when he just-as-mysteriously recovered, sans family and alone, he retreated into the mansion he had proudly built in 1936 for his family, pushed his brand new silver Bentley into the empty swimming pool, turned on the engine, and suffocated himself inside it with the help of a garden hose.

And so the prophet placed his aviators on the window and looked out onto the backyard with its empty swimming pool with the tiles cracked and damaged in the shape of a car. He lit the sixth candle and illuminated the sixth room, casting a faint yellow beam onto the backyard below. The sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth rooms all looked out onto the backyard, and all differed from the downstairs bedrooms in having actual beds, albeit only rusting collapsing bed frames. The prophet himself slept in the seventh bedroom, having the strongest bed frame of the rest. The mattress was dragged in from the ninth bedroom. The seventh and eighth bedrooms were unique in that they held the most striking connections to the past occupants of the mansion; door labels with names on them. Apparently, the seventh and eighth bedrooms were occupied by a ‘Sue’ and ‘David’ respectively.

It was always an unanswered question as to why no one came to reclaim the house. One story was that the entire family all contracted the very same mysterious disease as he did, but, unlike him, did not recover. Another story goes that they did not hear nor would have cared about his suicide, being uncontactable in Hong Kong. One other story goes that they did hear about his suicide, but were too afraid and too guilty to return to the site of their abandonment. The house had been standing and rotting for decades by the time the prophet took residence inside it. And as the house continued to rot, the prophet rotted within it.

The four back bedrooms sent four weak beams of light to the backyard, bathing the backyard in their combined glow. The prophet moved on to the four front bedrooms, all of which looked out onto the street. As he did earlier on the balcony, the prophet surveyed and contemplated the street as he lit the tenth candle. The streetlights and their artificial luminance, and the cars cruising past, exhuming poison into the air, express combo metal coffins, sending the passengers speeding off with the illusion of control, made from the goodness of the Earth. And all for what? For efficiency, for communication, for speed. As things in the world came closer together, all the prophet could see was people growing further apart. An ironic pairing of hostility and knowledge, as the people of the world, the people in control, the people with the big mouths, stoned and crucified the ones with the insight and courage to bring the light back in.

And as the prophet moved from the tenth room to the eleventh, purposefully lighting the eleventh candle, he saw the end. He saw war, famine and disease. He saw flames as hot as hell itself turn all before them into dust, to be blown away by cold, freezing winds that never cease. He saw weeping mothers holding stillborn infants. He saw sons betraying their parents to brainwashed soldiers, daughters offering up their own bodies to drug-addled politicians not for the money or for survival, but for their own amusement. He saw the trees and the animals of the world kept in cages, with only themselves to feed on, as iron juggernauts ruled the skies and stretched to the heavens, but never quite reaching. He saw the sun burn out, and fluorescent lights briefly illuminate the wasteland that was left, only to be snuffed out by the four-headed beast that appeared from beneath and from above, wiping out all that was left, as man’s infernal machines and machinations crumbled to ash and silvery tinkling stars falling to the ground, as the universe once again became void.

The prophet moved from the eleventh room in a bout of depression. He looked back to the rooms he had filled with light. Each bedroom receiving a little candle, upon which a small flickering tongue of flame danced and fought against the darkness, combining together to brighten the night. But the prophet knew that they were just candles, just little sacrifices to delay the inevitable. By the next day the wax, just like every other night, would have run out, and he would light all twelve again.

Trembling slightly, the prophet stood outside the twelfth room, head filled with doom and sacrifice and saints. As he reached for the doorknob, he was interrupted by a loud obnoxious knocking on the front door. Confused, the prophet half-ran downstairs with trepidation. On opening the door, he was greeted by a short man holding a large burning torch.  He had grey shoulder-length hair and sported a grey beard, and wore a purple robe to match the prophet’s brown. The man in the purple robe, with sly, twitching black eyes, watched the prophet’s eyes turn from anticipation to anger and back to loving sorrow again. Amidst the deafening song of the crickets and cicadas, the man in the purple robe half-smiled in the fragrant night air. At this, the prophet slowly and reluctantly stooped down, as if by routine, as the man in the purple robe planted a burning kiss on his left cheek.

- Andrew Cheah, December 2007

This was the first thing I wrote for the UCL Young Writer’s Society. If I remember correctly the task was to write anything with the title ‘On Carnaby Street They Sell Oranges’. I was two weeks late in presenting my piece, but they liked it anyway.

I actually used to hate this story, and felt mildly embarrassed when showing it to people.  Now I think it’s OK. 

PS. This was actually published in the UCL Pi magazine, but for some reason they cut out the entire first half of the story.

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I am in what a gentleman would call a fugue. I am not a gentleman, but I am sitting in Trafalgar Square with my back getting soaked by a light breeze of water and other substances wondering how and why there is what one would call a gentleman would refer to a pigeon gathering in the shape of a red cross symbol. I am forced to stand up and make my way uphill, thinking of a colour, any colour, to distract myself from the general feeling of 1) my back soaked 2) my shoes sinking 3) a loss of oxygen.

I was told I would see a bright white light, pearly gates, and a man with a long white beard and a little black book. Apparently I drowned in a fountain. Apparently it never happened. And what’s more, all the cigarettes are soaked. This is what I really saw: a towel, a policeman, and the colour green like exploding broccoli in your eye.

Let’s get this straight: I was never in Trafalgar Square. What I’m really doing is sitting in my room sticking on my boots like some kind of demented teddy bear so that I can later assault a granny with a wooden sword to procure her groceries. In other words, I was never dead, nor drowning, nor really thinking about pigeons (philosophically, that presents a problem best left to the 18^th century). I made it up, because the gentleman told me to.

It was, I think, about four hours before, when the gentleman, brown overcoat-ed, beret-ed, boat shoe-ed, was advising me to write a story about good-old-fashioned morals. He told me: It would save your life. I asked him: How? He told me: If I tell ya, I’ll have to kill ya.

That last phrase was in an American accent, exhaled in a cloud of cigarette smoke, and accompanied by a curiously ungentlemanly guffaw. I remember telling myself never to ever try to write a story. I’ve been telling myself that since. As a gentleman would say, ‘you still haven’t stopped have you, my good man?’

Sardonic citrus fucker…

Good-old-fashioned morals…figures…When I met the gentleman he was ‘in pursuit of the aborigine’ that had stolen his bowler hat and box of matches. In the words of a gentleman, ‘I may be drunk now, and I may be drunk later, but without my bowler hat and matches I shall never be able to smoke my cigarettes.’

This is how it happened: On a barmy Monday Morning I was sitting at the fountain at Trafalgar square quite contentedly munching on a muesli bar, thinking philosophically about pigeons and the lives they lead (I’ll get to this later), when I fell into the fountain and promptly drowned.

That’s a lie.

On a terrific Tuesday afternoon I was romancing my bitch when a gentleman clad in a brown overcoat, a beret and boat shoes, amongst other articles of clothing, dropped a box of matches and a bowler hat at my feet. He said, ‘My good man, I have quit for the final time.’

And that’s when a sudden gust of wind blew the bowler hat and matches upwards and towards my head, to briefly tickle my forehead before sinking irretrievably into the water.

That’s not true either.

The point is, I have no idea how the fuck I met the gentleman, because I have absolutely no idea where the notion of an aborigine came from, nor where he is running to with the gentleman’s bowler hat and matches. Why the gentleman is talking to me, I don’t know either, but he’s quite friendly to a point. 

The peculiar thing about the gentleman is how he hates thieves.

“I don’t like thieves,” he said to me, “they’re poo.”

                                                                                    Twenty-Two

There used to be a time when the gentleman held no such grudge against thieves. Granted, at the time, he too was a thief. But I would still maintain that his argument is valid. He told me of the city where everyone stole each others’ cars. In fact, it was never really stealing, because it was in the culture. People would drive to the store in their yellow Honda, leave their car with the keys inside, and come out to find their car had gone, but that a red beamer had taken its place, with the keys still inside.

“One would, I suspect, be reasonably hesitant to leave their pet pig inside the car, lest one wishes to spend the entire afternoon looking for said pig. But then again, what’s time to a hog?”

Now, now, one of many questions which I’m sure is on your lips is why a hog? The answer is that I used to own a pet pig. I realise this is uncommon. You see, pigs are honourable and noble creatures. Granted they like to roll in mud and occasionally, at least in films, eat human beings when provoked. To this I say, run in a zig-zag pattern. Protection from angry hogs aside, my pet pig taught me in its brief lifetime to 1) do unto others as I want others to do unto me 2) listen to my parents and 3) respect the sanctity of god-given life.

In the 18^th century, empowered by the scientific method and these principles in mind, the gentleman and I set out to apprehend the aborigine. Following our noses, supporting ourselves with empirical data and fashionable observation, we tracked the thief across London, to the white cliffs of Dover, and then back again to Waterloo. In a ribbon shape flourish we found ourselves back in Trafalgar Square glaring sternly at a gigantic lemon, with the bowler hat at its foot, while the box of matches sat at the apex and presided over the space like a red headed queen.

The gentleman sent me after the bowler hat while he scrambled up the lemon like a spider. Having acquired all the items required for resuming his smoking habit, the gentleman lit a cigarette and promptly looked extremely ungentlemanly. He must have sensed my thoughts because he looked at me and said, “If you listen to one thing I say, listen to this: Never ever smoke cigarettes.”

With that, the gentleman grinned and strolled in the direction of the river. As for me, I fell asleep on a grass patch, and awoke to a light drizzle, in the present tense, damp and hungry. I stand up and walk through a crowd of pigeons, sending them into the air in a calculated frenzy, flying towards the setting sun. I glance briefly at the hazy orange London skyline, and decide to move uphill, making my way to Carnaby Street.

- Andrew Cheah, October 2007

Believe it or not (don’t believe it), this is probably the most autobiographical story i’ve ever written, perhaps even more autobiographical than ‘New Year’s Day’.

————

My butt was planted firmly in the soft white sand of some unknown beach, while my fingers fidgeted purposelessly with what used to be a wire coat hanger, twisting the green-encased metal into new and wonderful shapes. By all accounts, it was the morning, on a Sunday; as all wonderful mornings usually are. It was the daytime of the nightime that you can never remember, with enough pointlessly useless memories that are important enough to change your entire life, which you remember with all the clarity of a particularly creative amnesic. The special time of the day, week, year, lifetime, when yesterday means nothing good and the present looks forward to the afternoon.

That was when I met the man from the sea. Initially I thought he was a small wave that never broke; a little mound of whitewash surrounded by calm water. Upon closer examination, I saw that he was leisurely swimming towards the beach in freestyle, his graceful arms keeping time with the waves breaking onto the beach. A glimpse of the man’s brown hair could be discerned from the surrounding whitewash, which suddenly engulfed him as he swam within ten feet of the shore. As suddenly as he disappeared, he rose from the water as gracefully as a dolphin, revealing himself to be a man in a black overcoat, wearing a white shirt held together at the collar by a neat bowtie. He was wearing a pair of loose khaki pants, a pair of dress shoes for footwear, and a jellyfish for a hat.

The man from the sea adjusted his bowtie and looked towards the beach, towards my slightly shell-shocked figure in the sand. My first reaction was to twist the coat hanger into a rectangular shape. If you ever end up trying this, you’ll find it’s quite easy, but also rather pointless. He squinted at me for a good while, then relaxed his face into a grin, as if he had sussed out that I was not a danger to him. He strutted towards me and bowed, dropping a pink, pulsating jellyfish at my feet. He grinned at me again and said, “You look familiar, have I met you before?”

I said, “No.”

I asked him, “Who are you?”

I asked him, “What’s with the jellyfish?”

A light breeze began to blow across the beach, sending the waves in a slightly different direction; a little bit towards the right. The wind caught the surface of the sand and blew it upwards creating a light moving beige fog. Small grains of sand lightly tickled my arms and legs, as I twisted the coat hanger back into a straight line. Behind me, the bush vegetation rustled.

The man from the sea fixed a pair of dazzling sparkling blue-green eyes upon me and scratched a small patch of stubble on his chin. He said, “To answer the first question, yes and no.”

Now now, I’m all for symmetry in sentence structure, but the unfortunate side-effect of such symmetry is a lack in comprehension. I gave him a quizzical look, hoping that my silence would be comprehensible to this weird apparition.

“I am you, and you are me,” he said

This was an improvement over the first answer, so I ran with it. I decided to dig my heels into the sand, so that I was ankle deep in the surface of the beach. The feeling of the small grains of rock brushing across the skin, lightly pressing against the sole of your foot, and eventually engulfing it all, as you push lightly but determinedly against it, is amazing. The notion of becoming a part of the beach, a part of the physical world surrounding you, this is living.

He went on to answer the third question, about the jellyfish, “The past five years, I have spent in a miraculous state of flux between the liquid and solid. It was, all said, pretty confusing. It all started at my sister’s wedding, where my sister, in one of her more impulsive moments, threw a bottle of champagne at my head. Being her brother, I was used to such treatment, and let it fly. The problem here was not that it hit, because it didn’t. The problem was in who it eventually hit. My uncle the blind TV mogul was hit in the shin. Being blind and drunk, he shouted, with great enthusiasm I might add, to his bodyguards to ‘kill everyone’. So now we had a wedding overrun by bodyguards and the SAS and the FBI and the BBC. I remember my sister running off with her wife, little schnauzer in tow, leaving me with a half-finished cheesecake.”

“Small digression here, but I have to mention that it is my own personal opinion that cheesecakes should be more cheese than cake, and not the other way round. Far too many times I have been led falsely into paying through the nose at some high-end patisserie to get cheesecake that is ‘lightly fluffy’. No! I draw the line! Cheesecake is best eaten like a block of chocolate, you should feel bloated, like your navel has gone up and decided to escape from your body to form a small civilisation in the mushroom farm…”

My own navel, I might add, was very safely in my belly, and entertained no such notions of rebellion, and was probably several evolutionary eons away from self-awareness amongst the mushrooms. The evolutionary state of my fingers, however, is up for debate. The fingers off my left hand let go of the coat hanger, moved to my belly, and scratched it. I examined my index finger; long, slightly bony, and topped off with a trimmed fingernail.

“… the time I spent in the abattoir, well, it’s no slouch I can tell you that! You’ve got to be quick in slicing up the meat, in my case, the cows, the beef. Beefcake, you see? They’ve got a quota to meet and they want it done by the end of your shift. Bad pay, horrible conditions, and a smell like the holocaust. It sticks to you as well. I didn’t stay in the abattoir for long; couldn’t really handle it. Anyhoo, I left work on, I think it was two days after payday; when the boyfriend turned up in a Chrysler. I asked him, ‘what are you doing here?’ The boy, he’s so cute, he said, ‘I don’t know, but do you want to go to Tibet?’”

“So that’s what we did. We went to Tibet, climbed the Himalayas, met the grand abbot, ate with the monks, played in the snow. The grand abbot, I must say, he had some great advice. He told us about the present. Not the future, nor the past. The present. The now. He said that life is worthless if we cannot look at what we have at this exact moment in time, and not find a reason to live in it. He told us that experience is made out of the past, is the present, and looks towards the future. He also told me time is an illusion. And that I could be you looking at me talking about the grand abbot standing in the snow in his great big orange robe while we all grow older and younger at the same time. He told me, we grow younger everyday.”

The man from the sea had hit his stride. His talking had reached a steady rhythm intimately locked in with the rest of the world. I listened closely, as he made the waves on the beach louder and faded out the rustling bushes, creating a light skittering beat from the soft crunch of the sand, and morphed the orchestra inwards to focus on a heartbeat that seemingly came from behind. It shifted to him, and then to my own chest. The orchestra suddenly exploded and seemed to ripple from the beach, up my ankles, through my body, and ending in my head, which sent a return pulse back down my body back to the man from the sea, amplifying itself across the sand and towards the shore where it moved out across the crashing water to the sun beam horizon.

“All of us, we are all raindrops. Each of us individually a droplet of water falling to the ground. But collectively rain. Together we are all the same, connected deeply by a shared destination. Individually, we are just a small force on the ground, but collectively, we could be a flood. And as we fall, we grow larger and larger. Did you know that all life as we know it is simply one of Vishnu’s teardrops? It starts with the guy crying, it falls, and all of a sudden bang! It’s gone!”

The man from the sea had completely lost me. I laid back, closed my eyes, and let the sunshine wash over me. My heels buried in the sand, my body and head horizontal, with the chatter of the man from the sea in the background mixed in with the roar of the surf, the swish of the air and the hum of the ground. My left hand involuntarily drew shapes in the sand with the coat hanger. Shapes which no one save God could decipher. I drifted…

“…and all of a sudden there’s a jellyfish on my head!”

I opened my eyes at the mention of jellyfish, and suddenly remembered the entire point of the story. The man from the sea didn’t seem to notice my drifting off. In fact, he had climbed a tree about twenty feet away from me and had shouted the conclusion of his story at me. The man from the sea jumped down the tree in one fell swoop, and walked towards me again. He took the coat hanger from my left hand, leaving me to draw my sand shapes with my index finger. I squinted up at the man from the sea. He had fashioned himself a kind of belt with seashells and kelp. He grinned. The man from the sea proceeded to wave my coat hanger in the air as a farewell, and then ran back into the sea and swam off. It took me a fair few seconds, maybe even a minute, to realise that he had taken the jellyfish with him as well.

- Andrew Cheah, July 2007

—————-

Part 1

Christopher Keith McKinney entered Amanda’s life at the tender age of sixteen. Amanda was disappointed. She left him naked, standing a fool beneath the recyclable fabrics tent, surrounded by rejected clown costumes.

Popping a mint into her mouth, Amanda made her way to Mrs Henderson’s for a glass of milk. Mrs Henderson owned the only cow in the circus, also the only animal other than Jumbo not used to for show purposes. Nellie was the sole milk provider of the circus. Needless to say she had to work very hard. Nellie hated her job, but she was pampered, and was free to roam anywhere she wanted. Nellie had actually developed a kind of attachment to her owner. She watched Mrs Henderson hand a Mr Parsnip a jar of milk, and thought briefly about going for a walk before suddenly and immediately falling asleep.

Mr Parsnip was in charge of the ropes. He was a small short bald man who insisted on wearing checkered pants with checkered shirts. His innate stubbornness could be matched only by Amanda’s, another diminutive figure, but with better fashion sense. He ignored her as she walked into Mrs Henderson’s tent.

Amanda, at the age of seventeen, had the unenviable reputation among the adults of being a troublemaker, despite having never been proven to have caused any of it. Her reputation amongst the boys, and girls, of the circus was wildly different. Short, curly haired, tanned, and green eyed, the teenagers all knew and liked her. Born to a single mother, who later disappeared, she was an orphan from the age of twelve. Amanda was also secretly despised by the adults, who also loved to hazard guesses as to who her father was and where he was from.

“Amanda is dangerous. There will come a time, very soon now, when she will be the seed of the destruction of this circus. We cannot do anything about it, and it will happen.”

“Jumbo, you’ve said this a million times, but what about now?” the adults, Mr Parsnip among them, said.

“The coming winter will be much colder than normal. Your children will not feel this and they will want to play outside.”

The adults, all of whom loved their children very much, were concerned. They asked the hippopotamus, “What shall we do?”

Jumbo suggested to them, “Perhaps a curfew, just for the winter. I realise that they will not like this, but I know for a fact that you would not want them to fall ill under the circumstances.”

The adults, frowning to themselves, discussed the matter. They did not like putting their children under such a draconian rule, but they trusted Jumbo. He has often saved the circus from bankruptcy, and has always suggested the best place for the circus to move to for the best audience, helping to create the Hinterland Circus’ reputation as the best circus in the country. Coming to a consensus, they told Jumbo, “Alright, we will set a curfew of 7 o’clock.”

Chelsea, Simon, Michelle and Nathan gasped. Eavesdropping outside the main tent where Jumbo was residing, they looked at each other in panic and decided to call a meeting amongst the children of the circus. Splitting up, they ran to tell the others, passing Mr Roger and Mr Nigel, the two clowns of the circus.

Mr Roger said to Mr Nigel, “Hey, what do you call a red tent with a feather for a flag?”

Mr Nigel said to Mr Roger, “What?”

Mr Roger said to Mr Nigel, “A red Indian!”

Exiting the main tent the adults were greeted by the sight of the two circus clowns rolling over on the grass in raucous laughter. Quizzically they looked at each other, then shrugged and continued on their way, with intent to inform their children of the new curfew. Unbeknownst to them, however, none of their children would be home, having crowded into the horse paddock for a meeting of their own.

“That’s stupid!” Lisa exclaimed indignantly. She was sitting in the middle of the crowd of children, listening to the new developments as cooked up by the adults. Her opinion was immediately echoed loudly by the rest, except for Amanda.

She was sitting at the rear of the paddock trimming her fingernails with a toe clipper. Amanda was midway through her left hand when the eruption of protest began in earnest. Calmly she snipped through her ring fingernail as the group exploded in a mass of anonymous voices.

Nathan watched the fingernail spring from her finger and sail through the air into a mound of dirt. He watched her move on to her left pinky, and then shouted over the throng, “We should just kill Jumbo!”

There was no response from Amanda, who had quietly moved on to her right hand. The rest of the crowd, however, fell silent and turned to Nathan in incredulity.

“We can’t do that,” Chelsea’s voice chimed out, “we still need Jumbo. We all need Jumbo, even I know that.”

The children murmured to themselves as Nathan, red-faced and defeated, went back to his corner and continued watching Amanda and her long fingers push on with their task. She stopped and cleared her throat to speak.

“Well, we can see where he’s coming from, although I obviously don’t agree with it,” Amanda said softly, eyes fixed on Nathan’s feet. Nathan smiled sheepishly back. “However much we need Jumbo this decision is not helping any of us,” Amanda ended. 

The children agreed. “What we need is simply something to convince our parents that a curfew just won’t work. They can’t control us like puppets,” Simon said.

Continuing on from Simon, Chelsea’s voice rang out loud and clear, saying, “We should just, not, follow what they say. They can’t do anything when all of us do the same thing at once.”

The children, Nathan included, agreed, voting to simultaneously leave the house at ten to seven, even if they did not like playing in the dusk.

The meeting over, Nathan looked around for Amanda, but found she had left early, having already trimmed all ten fingernails.

Part 2

Mr Nigel said to Mr Roger, “Knock knock!”

Mr Roger said to Mr Nigel, “Who’s there?”

Mr Nigel said to Mr Roger, “Haji.”

Mr Roger said to Mr Nigel, “Haji who?”

Mr Nigel said to Mr Roger, “Hajinomoto!”

Nathan barely heard the roar of laughter. He was fidgety and murmuring to himself, pacing up and down outside Amanda’s tent. In one hand was a large pair of shears, in the other a bouquet of exactly twenty two roses. Nathan knew there were twenty two roses because he was feeling that he spent too much time picking them. He also realized he did not need the shears at all. Taking a deep breath, he entered Amanda’s empty tent and placed the roses on her bed.

Amanda’s tent was the only one-man tent in the entire circus. Being an orphan and distrusted by most of the adults, she had to spend her sleeping nights alone. That said, it was a very nice tent. It was sturdy and was one of the few tents without any holes in the fabric, granting her a level of privacy unmatched in the Hinterland Circus.

The tent was made by a certain Mrs McKinney, one of the few adults whom, instead of distrusting or disregarding Amanda, actually sympathized with her. She was the circus’ primary tent maker, and was well respected for it. Mrs McKinney had made a special effort in making Amanda’s tent, choosing the best fabrics and sewing the best stitches. She wanted Amanda to at least be as comfortable as possible in her own home.

At that moment, Mrs McKinney was making a cup of Chai tea for herself and contemplating visiting Mrs Henderson, and troubling poor Nellie, for more milk. She was thinking of maybe preparing a stew for dinner, being extraordinarily free for the day. Deciding on the stew, she also decided to pass the time by snooping through her son’s, Christopher Keith McKinney’s, partition. Every mother does this, they just don’t talk about it, she reasoned with herself, as the town clock struck six.

Somewhere in the town, someone was missing a television, at the time being pushed on a trolley towards the circus by Simon and Chelsea. They decided to leave it at Simon’s tent while waiting for a buyer. Simon then went on to join a mass game of football while Chelsea wandered over to Amanda’s tent.

“That’s a lot of roses,” she said.

“I know,” Amanda replied, pensively peeling off the petals. She was thinking of feet. Big ones. And then she looked at her own, small and well-formed, but with funny shaped toes. And then she turned ever so slightly to the right, to the dress that had gathered at Chelsea’s feet.

Turning her attention to fingers, Amanda explored Chelsea’s body as Chelsea explored Amanda’s, the two girls softly pressing against each other on a bed of red rose petals.

Mrs Henderson stepped absentmindedly on a twenty-second rose. She was looking for Nellie, who had uncharacteristically disappeared from her enclosure without even giving Mrs Henderson a warning moo. Mrs Henderson was worried that her poor overworked cow had run away.

Mrs Henderson loved Nellie dearly, and she thought Nellie loved her as much as she did. Her only insecurity with the relationship was the necessity of her having to milk poor Nellie to provide for the entire circus, one of Jumbo’s plans, which she knew Nellie hated because she was always distant to Mrs Henderson after being milked.

And now Nellie was gone, because the circus, Mrs Henderson, had taken too much. No consideration for the cow’s feelings. Approaching the field Mrs Henderson caught a priceless glimpse of Simon accidentally kicking a mud-coated football straight into Mr Parsnip’s favourite yellow-green check shirt.

Mr Parsnip rubbed his graying head vigorously in frustration as Simon ran up to apologise and retrieve the football. He had nothing to say to Simon. He stomped back to his tent, passing the main tent on the way, out of which a relatively somber Christopher Keith McKinney emerged.

On entering his own tent and into his own partition, Christopher Keith McKinney found someone had gone through his belongings. He walked into his parents’ partition to ask his mother about it and found it empty, save for a tear-soaked handkerchief sitting starkly on her dressing table next to his journal.

Deliberating quickly, Christopher Keith McKinney reciprocated. He rummaged through his parents’ chest of belongings and retrieved a newspaper wrapped package. Satisfied, he left his parents’ tent and walked in the same direction as Nellie just a few hours earlier.

Nellie was lounging lazily on a bed of daisies when a feeling of extreme dread came over her. Sitting up, she looked back towards the distant tents of the circus.

“Moo?”

Christopher Keith McKinney reached a remote field, next to a plantation of curiously clean-picked rose bushes. He kneeled on the brittle, dry grass before Nathan’s deep footprints, back facing the sun. Christopher Keith McKinney, with fragile delicacy, carefully opened the newspaper package, wrapped his lips round the barrel of the revolver, and blew out the back of his throat.

The gunshot at half past seven startled everyone, forcing them to stop what they were doing, but it was Nellie’s loud sorrowful mooing that led them to the field, now stained dark red with McKinney’s blood. The entire circus population formed a circle around the body and Mrs McKinney and Nellie, listening uncomfortably to her wailing. All of them too shocked to step too near.

Arriving last, Amanda and Chelsea learnt the cause of the gunshot amidst murmurings between the adults, some of them vaguely commenting on the wisdom of Jumbo’s seven o’clock curfew as evidenced by the boy’s death.

Amanda kept silent through the whisperings, gazing despondently at the cheerless scene. She overheard Mr Parsnip mentioning the last place he was seen, and began to understand. Her green eyes wandered past Mrs Henderson, silently dragging the newly-found Nellie out of the circle, and settled on the yellow flag of the main tent, flying proudly in the fading evening light.

Part 3

Mr McKinney, acrobat, father, husband, war hero, woke up early in the morning to find his wife tending to a small fire in which their late son’s belongings were being burned. Mr McKinney thought better than to stop her. She was still sobbing. He also thought better than to tell her of the whisperings he had come to know about late in the night, about the quality of their parentage, about the senseless secretive reasons for their son’s suicide. Only one half of the couple had a general idea of the truth. And she was making sure no one else would find out.

One other person, though, did know. But the secret was safe with her. Amanda was a quiet, private girl, and was one of those rare people who kept both her own secrets, and others’, to herself. Much like Mrs McKinney, Amanda had had a sleepless night, spending the seven hours thoughtfully playing with rose petals with her feet. At dawn she ran into Nathan. Sniffing the smoke and ash in the air, she intoned to the flummoxed teenager, “Do you still want to kill Jumbo?”

He could not say no. He walked back to his tent and fetched a large pair of shears. Egged on by the grim determination on Amanda’s face, he followed her past the horse paddocks, past the recyclable fabrics tent, past Mrs Henderson’s tent, and into the main tent, feeling like a fool.

Mrs Henderson stroked Nellie’s head apologetically, and then forced herself to sit down on her stool to begin the morning milking. Mid-way through, however, she stopped. She looked up again at Nellie’s sad face, and took the bucket and left it in the corner. She decided to go for a short walk about the circus, needing to clear her head and sort out the happenings of the day before.

His shirt soaking in a bucket of water, Mr Parsnip cursed the careless football playing children, and immediately retracted it. He wanted to be the nice guy; the genial, wise, respected, middle-aged man. He was glad he could help out poor Mrs Henderson the night before, giving her at least a last glimpse of her son, aimlessly wandering out of the main tent looking at his shoes. Mr Parsnip had absolutely no idea.

“I told Christopher we don’t need his kind around here. We are a decent, moral circus,” Jumbo leveled with Amanda. She turned around and snatehed the pair of shears from Nathan.

She did not bother to continue with the subject. The pair of shears hanging loosely off her fingers, Amanda said to the hippopotamus, “I guess you know why we’re here.”

“Yes I do, and I know I can’t stop you,” the gigantic, vulnerable, gray animal replied, “I knew this was coming from day one. All I can say is that you will regret this.”

Proud, serious and authoritative to the end. Amanda was sick of it. Abruptly, she charged at the hippopotamus with the pair of shears. Nathan watched Amanda inexpertly maul the poor animal, which remained silent and twitching throughout the ordeal. And then he noticed Jumbo’s gleaming raisin black benevolent eyes. He ran forward and took the shears from her, and proceeded to cleanly slice a hole in Jumbo’s blood stained throat.

The damp and dewy morning sunrise peaked out from the hills in the east, slowly colouring the sky in a fresh magenta. Lisa, lying outside her tent, was admiring the shifting hues in the heavens when she heard Mr Parsnips’ tent flap open. She sat up to say hello, and was replied with Mr Parsnip proudly parading his naked body for the entire world to see.

“Good morning,” he said.

Lisa gave a small shriek and ran away. She passed Mrs Henderson’s tent, where she had just returned from her walk and was playing with some beads. Mrs Henderson looked at her tough, callused fingers. She thought she was beginning to show signs of developing rheumatism. She looked up sympathetically at Nellie, sad pathetic eyes blinking back at her. Suddenly she stood up and unlocked her cow, leaving her free to go. She resolved never to have a pet again.

Nellie watched Mrs Henderson detach the chain just installed the night before. She let her former owner stroke her again. Mrs Henderson stood looking at her for a while, and then turned to the half filled bucket of milk sitting in the corner. Mrs Henderson smiled at Nellie, and then took off her top, and went on to fill up the remainder of the bucket with her own. Nellie was horrified and confused, and haltingly walked out of the tent. She continued to amble out of the circus and into the open world. Nellie wanted to look back, but knew she could never bear to.

Lisa, tired out, noticed Nellie leaving the circus. Maybe Mrs Henderson is sleeping, she thought, and ran towards Mrs Henderson’s tent to tell her. She knew how attached she was to her cow. Just outside the McKinney’s tent however, she was stopped by Mr Nigel the clown. He held her tightly to his body, chuckling, “Do you know what they say about big feet?” Lisa struggled in vain against Mr Nigel’s strong arms, and watched in terror as Mr Roger made his way towards the McKinney’s tent holding a sword.

Mr McKinney saw Mr Roger’s silhouette approaching the tent, slowly but surely growing larger. He calmly reached for the axe hanging off the side of the cupboard, steadied himself, and lay in wait for the tent flap to peel to the side.

“Would you like some tea?” Mrs McKinney asked. She did not care that there was no answer, she decided to make some for him anyway. Eventually he would drink it. Besides, the water was already boiled. Mourning the lack of paternal influence on her late son’s life, Mrs McKinney took some Oleander flowers from the vase next to her and cracked open the stems, squeezing the sap into the white porcelain cup.

Meanwhile, in the main tent, Amanda and Nathan writhed and flexed upon each other, rolling about on a canvas of red, Jumbo’s blood spread all about them, and the lifeless corpse just sitting there, watching the two lovers ravage each other in ecstasy. It was the best sex Amanda ever had. 

- Andrew Cheah, September 2006.