Issue Eight

ISSUE EIGHT

⇜ An NUS Literary Society Publication ⟿

Masthead ________________________________________________________________

Charmaine Tay, Editor-in-Chief

Charmaine majors in English Literature and Philosophy. She joined the NUS Literary Society in the hopes of knowing like-minded folks with a passion for literature in its many forms. Being a reader of Symbal before joining Publications, she has found much fulfilment in reading local works, and hopes Symbal will be a platform for undergraduate writers to publish their work and readers to appreciate hitherto 'hidden' talent in out midst. Her spare time is often spent reading horror stories.

_________________________________________________________________________________ Somya is a freshman, and is going to major in English Literature. She is hoping she can soon convert her passion for languages into academic benefit in the form of a minor in her study of French. Symbal, she believes, can be a sturdy and vital platform for Singapore's intellectual youth to both experience this contentment, as well as to test first-hand the relatively unchartered source of empowerment that is creative writing. When Somya Jain, she isn't curled up by a window with a good book and a Executive Editor mug of hot cocoa, Somya can be found letting loose in dance classes or horseback riding.

_________________________________________________

Sue-Ann Tan, Executive Editor

Sue-Ann majors in English Literature. She joined the NUS Literary Society to meet other book worms with an interest in literature and writing. She enjoys editorial writing and is endlessly fascinated by Modernist literature. She hopes that local writers, especially undergraduates, will be given a literary voice in Symbal and showcase the talent that fellow Singaporean writers have.

_______________________________________________________ Thoughts and comments welcome! Send them to symbalmagazine@gmail.com.

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SYMBAL MAGAZINE: ISSUE EIGHT Editor’s First Words Beach Holiday Ng Hui Ying The Crowd Jonathan Liautrakhul Lily and Danny Denise Khng Medicine Cabinet Desiree Khng Sulphur Amanda Lee Decapitation Desiree Khng Frogspawn Tham Zheng Teng Night Terror Amanda Lee Announcements Submission Guidelines

-⋄ Editor’s First Words ⋄My first encounter of Symbal was via the NUS Literary Society website, and reading on out of pure curiosity was to make as astounding discovery: that writers weren't just people who were miles and miles away, or, for our local authors, somewhere in Singapore, whose presences, though far away, we felt through books in bookshops, but they were among us, on this very campus.

That wouldn't be possible without the dedication of the previous tireless team of editors from before - Isaac, previous Editor-inChief and founder of Symbal, and Justin and Suranjana, Executive Editors - to this magazine. The present team, Somya, Sue-Ann and myself, hopes to emulate their commitment to Symbal as a publishing platform for literary works on campus.

Reading this month's entries, they seem to have one thing in common: a devotion to minutiae, across the levels of the emotional, natural and the social. In "Decapitation", love, loss and regret are found in every corner of life (the past, the present; abroad, at home) following a family tragedy. A keen poet's eye draws nature in minute detail in "Frogspawn". The little things, easily overlooked, can often come to mean so much. It is as if these stories persuade from us a pause in our own lives, and impress on us a need to savour the smallest of instances.

Yet for the proof of the pie is in the eating, it is perhaps best to allow these stories and poems to speak for themselves.

Charmaine Tay Editor-in-Chief 11th December 2013

Beach Holiday A speed boat draws a plume of white A feather of surf on blue-tipped tide As children wander by the bayside Tracing, like honey bees, their teachers’ footsteps Sheltered from the sun by the grey-dusted sky.

On polished floors we stride in line Behind our doddering head-of-maternal-line But as life slows down and seabirds dine on fish flesh fragrant with salted rime we stop and listen to our lingering breaths and smooth the skin on our weathered hands we see the rolling waves with their distant glitter the glimmering promise of a World in a word: Yonder.

Ng Hui Ying

The Crowd Sitting in the train I make out a crowd The grimy smell of sweat Hangs out in the air Long thin bodies swaying Like the old willows and sycamore trees And I think to myself If I should stand up and join them as well.

Jonathan Liautrakul

Lily and Danny Denise Khng Lily was in the bathroom when they called to say that Danny was dead. Lily was in the bathroom, on the fourth floor on Pike Street, Seattle, when they said Danny had drowned himself in a public bath near Waseda University in Tokyo two months after he had arrived from New York. Lily was in the bathroom removing mascara from her lashes and misting up the bathroom with the shower when the phone rang impatiently with the news that Danny had killed himself after eight whole weeks of being his happiest self, with a suicide note written in Japanese, and an accompanying haiku to boot, which, in accordance to the seventeen-syllable rule, loosely translated to: The pet goldfish swims round and round in his glass bowl in my New York home.

Lily ran out the bathroom and out the street into the cold Seattle air, in her white bathrobe - like the snow that fell outside in Tokyo the day Danny died – and left a mix of tears and wet footprints outside the doorsteps of her apartment block. I think she wanted to see if she could momentarily catch him in a time-lapsed transition between life and death, or if for that sacred moment which would never come again, she could teleport to Tokyo to see him for herself and believe it. Someone took a picture with his Polaroid and she grabbed the camera from him and hurled it against a tree. Whether she screamed at him or not, I do not know. But I’d like to think the entire act was silent. Except for the sounds of glass shattering and the sole audience bellowing.

Lily said there was never a pet goldfish in Danny’s apartment in New York. When he was a child, perhaps? No, never ever, said Lily. Danny only liked animals which could respond. Like dogs or cats. They had a dog once. A mongrel called Jack. Jack ran away after a walk in Central Park. Never found him. That was last year, when Lily was still working as a waitress in New York.

Lily said that Danny was studying biology in college in New York.

She couldn’t remember what he specialised in. I wasn’t interested in science, she explained. Neither am I. But Danny had other passions besides science that they could talk about. Like music?

Yes, he could play the violin pretty well – he played for her once, said Lily. Lily plays the cello.

Lily said the thing she liked most about Danny was that he had brown hair and blue eyes. They made him look intense, and intelligent. Anything else? He enjoyed classical music – Rachmaninoff was his favourite, and hers too – and he liked talking about how they could all live in Paris someday and buy a house hear the Riviera. Lily loved Paris. Or just the very thought of it. Lily liked him too because he simply made her happy.

Lily didn’t know why Danny killed himself even after having his note translated for her. What was in there? It contained things about how he loved the snow in New York. He was happy, insisted Lily. How did anyone know Danny was happy in Tokyo? He called every day. He wished Lily could come see Japan too and take a bath at the sentō. Public baths were a novelty to him.

Lily said she moved to Seattle because there was an open call for auditions for cellists for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Danny didn’t mind because he was going to Japan anyway. They put the New York apartment on lease. No goldfish, really? No goldfish, Lily affirmed.

Was Danny upset about leaving? Danny wanted to experience Japan. Six months wouldn’t kill. No pun? No pun. Danny and Lily knew they could hold out six months. There was all the time in the future to spend every day together. Perhaps the haiku isn’t supposed to be taken literally. But Danny never studied poetrywriting, said Lily.

Lily said she got fired from the orchestra because she had a problem with punctuality. One time during a matinee, she got to the theatre only during the interval because she took one sleeping pill too many. She was an insomniac. Lily said that she used to watch Danny fall asleep every night; it was lulling to watch his slowed, rhythmic breathing. She said it was like watching the waves undulating in a calm ocean. No breeze – just the water with a life of its own.

That interview happened twenty years ago, back in 1989.

Danny wanted to be free.

To float.

Just like oxygen.

Just as natural as the air people shared.

Just as light and elusive and boundless as the world without its jungle.

To be with me.

Every day.

The goldfish was never a point of contention. The last time he saw a goldfish was at the fair at Central Park back in ’87. It was swimming around in a plastic blow-up pool along with mollies and other kinds of fish. But it was the only goldfish, glittery and shiny and made surreal by the water, almost like an orange statue of Venus come-to-life. All the children tried to catch it with their paper nets but couldn’t. Each time they missed it or it wriggled free, they scooped their nets through the water more forcefully, and the water-soaked paper would then tear softly, just like their cotton candy hopes. But no, Danny didn’t try to catch it that way.

After the children gave up and headed to more interesting stalls, and the water stilled, the reflection of towering city apartments glistened in the plastic pool. The goldfish circled in one of the upper-floor windows, its gills expanding and contracting like the slowed rhythmic heartbeat of a broken man. Danny held the net as flatly as possible, and lifted it out of the water, where it squirmed for a bit before sliding into its downsized home of a water-filled plastic bag. So much for the privacy of its own water room – I was sure it missed the mollies. He insisted on releasing it but didn’t say where. We took a train to New Haven and he held on tightly to the plastic bag throughout, occasionally widening the opening to get more air in for the goldfish. People stared at him like the way they’d stare at a homeless man with a pet dog, but he didn’t seem to notice. We ended up at the Housatonic where he let it go. It didn’t matter that the goldfish was going to end up in the sea where the saltwater was going to kill it anyway. He just wanted it out in the water. God, Danny, you’re crazy. Nuh-uh, he said, no one would want to be safe and survive without a reason to live; anyone who does is crazy. What keeps you living, Danny, what keeps you living? Oxygen. What about people? You do.

I knew it was coming.

Coming like the rain.

Coming like the sea.

Coming like a teardrop.

Back in the city where the sky parted as if a hand ripped apart the atmospheric blanket and held a magnifying glass to burn the world, two nineteen-year-olds could not find the words to express regret and solitude. It was the summer of June, ’87, where the half the dorm windows were kept open and half were kept shut.

Danny’s window was shut. And the room was blue. Including his window. He was sitting at the edge of his bed, hands clasped under his chin, staring ahead with dark blue eyes, like a subject in Picasso’s Blue Period. I sat at the other end of the bed where the pillows were. There was silence, not awkward but not entirely comfortable either, for about thirty minutes. During it, everything seemed part of a photograph. He didn’t move. I didn’t move. But physically we weren’t tense. We just sat naturally, and breathed and stared at the drawer, the wardrobe, the bed, the carpet, the window.

It was in this blue room that he said he hated New York. He said he hated the crowds. He said he hated the streets. He said he hated me because I was preventing him from leaving.

So I left.

A month later, he met Lily. And then two months later, he didn’t live on campus anymore.

I found out Danny was dead when I was an intern sifting through cartoons for The New Yorker. I found out Danny was dead when I was writing a rejection letter to a certain P. Thomas Ailey who had sent in an ill-drawn illustration of a schoolboy falling into a wishing well with a caption proclaiming, “THE SEARCH FOR THE MISSING MERMAID – DISNEY KILLS”. I found out Danny was

dead when I was wondering if Thomas Ailey knew how to swim. A mutual friend had called. She said she hoped I’d be okay. I remember not feeling anything and continuing the cartoon task to completion. Later, I walked around the city for a while, and returned to college about midnight where I sat on the snow outside the dormitory building and bawled. I would like to forget I did that, but, try as I might, it’s always the last image I have in my mind before I go to bed.

Of course, I had to go ask Lily what she knew. I didn’t tell her who I was.

I just pretended I was a journalist.

She thought she was going to be famous. Newspapers and all that, she beamed.

Yeah, sure, Lily, newspapers and all that. Just like Liz Taylor and The Beatles and Danny. And you, Lily. You. She used to sing, she told me. But she stopped after awhile. She said it came with growing up.

She wanted her picture taken. She pushed her hair back, took my lipstick from my purse and dabbed it on, then looked into my Kodak, transformed by her own sense of finality.

Smile, flash, snap.

Call me when it’s done, she begged. Call me.

I went home, tore out the negatives in the morning and tossed them out the window onto the snow several stories below. I lost her number too.

I was in Paris when I read that Lily was dead. I was in Paris, in a room on the second floor of the Marriot, reading last week’s copy of The New York Times when I saw her picture in the orbituary.

Lily. Out of Seattle. In 2009. Displaced. Transposed. Alone. Selfaware.

Same pulled-back hair. Same smile. Possibly borrowed lipstick.

Non-candid pose. No family. Just a little tribute by the halfway house she had been dying in.

Yeah, same Lily.

You can’t capture someone in an obituary picture.

Likewise, you can’t capture reflection in a round glass bowl.

The pet goldfish swims round and round in his glass bowl not facing himself.

Not knowing itself.

What keeps you alive, Danny? Oxygen. And people? You do.

Disney kills because there is no mermaid.

Take a picture. Candidly.

Then face yourself. Alone.

What keeps you alive, Danny?

Oxygen.

And people?

You do.

Rewind.

Medicine Cabinet Down here the voices fester Glistening through the cracks, and shards; Writhing in their crevices.

They share fractions of my smile But all they harbour are sounds, Anchored by my stranger’s cry And the leaking of the tap.

I hear them laughing; all scattered, Birthing a chorus on the tiles.

They don’t retreat or surrender.

So with the creasing of half-light I take one smiling from the floor, To rest my soul in quiet; to sleep – Only to wake in a present Rinsed from the colour of daybreak.

Desiree Khng

Sulphur Some loves are easier to forget Than others: the hint of a smile on A sepia-toned photograph; the smell of Something once thought familiar.

Some seams are easier to mend.

Tick-tock; it's a familiar routine You follow again and again Until you remember what is real, Like the cataclysmic suicide Of a lingering terror Which cannot be dispelled.

I know there must be words For this state of mind I can only Feel but not describe.

Some days I loathe to wake.

Some days I see my sister in dreams, Running through the woods She never dared to step into.

Then I remember only the fire And the despair that comes Only with hope.

Amanda Lee

Decapitation Desiree Khng There was a saxophonist outside belting carols, and the music streamed like water. He noted the loose change in the opened instrument case; four dollars and a dime. They were all in coins, all glittering too much in the night. Eyesores, he thought. So he leaned forward to slip in a fifty- dollar note.

Eyesores. Sore eyes. Reddened eyes. Case lining sopped russet by snow— A bicycle shot past in front of him, ploughing up chunks of dirtcaked frost which sopped his shoes. He stumbled back over dark boots and heels scuttling out like beetles from a wreathed Starbucks entrance, momentarily stunned. In that comforting blankness he forgot where he was. Then the night-time cold roused him back to anguish, and he stepped discreetly out of the way, melting into the shadows of the crowd to nothingness.

I’m cold.

Up ahead a champagne cork loosened, sucking a plump wet kiss on its glass embrace before its descent into the gutter. The bottle’s contents exploded like confetti, in a sticky cascade of gold-flecked rain, but died on the cindered laughter of black coats and scarves.

He wondered what to make of the child on a certain set of shoulders, running her palms through that drink-specked coat and licking them clean of alcohol; would she get intoxicated to death, if she did that every day?

A mynah flew into the ceiling fan of our school canteen, his sister once told him, it sounded like an explosion. There was nothing but feathers and they fell all over the place, but everyone was, like, “Where’s the body? Where’s the blood?” And we ran around

combing for the remains. There was really nothing. Then later someone yelled that its head was swimming in his bowl of laksa.

We screamed our own heads off.

Near a rubbish bin the remains of a dead pigeon fluttered like ash in the frost.

He struggled to adjust his scarf. It was burgundy, expensivelooking; the reason why Vive had liked it. And because he adored her and the wild opinions crackling in her impulsive head, he made sure it saw through all seven New York winters he endured for her fledging exhibitions there.

Here.

So this was supposed to be the eighth one.

His cell phone pulsed in his coat pocket. He cradled it out. It was a Singaporean number, detached and unfamiliar. He thought of ignoring the call.

So he drifted wherever his steps took him, hoping to flee to a different track of thoughts, but the wintry milieu seemed bogged with manifestations of a nightmare that was bludgeoning his mind to tatters. The neon-lit Broadway advertisements melted into garish paper offerings, and the hard glittering skyscrapers took on the sinuous arcs of giant steles. He thought of the snow as a vast wet shroud. Crazy, he chided himself.

And he threw his attention to the caller. Guess the Caller; it could be the title of a B-grade gore fest.

The medical head. He had left for New York at such short notice that no one knew of his departure- except for his colleagues at the cardiothoracic department.

And front-desk Trudy. He figured that Trudy, herself distressed by the bombshell he had frenziedly shot over to her as he sprinted out the door, had forgotten the crux of her administrative duties and instead sought succour in the yellowed novena prayer book she kept under the keyboard.

Or, more realistically, she had been drowning in the task of rescheduling his patients to the other surgeons.

So now the head was annoyed with him for his reckless, surreptitious escape to New York.

No, not annoyed. The head would be sympathetic.

Escape to New York. Vive had had that title in her extinct Sweet Valley collection. He used to read it whenever his mind wandered from his biology notes, paperback fastened discreetly under the canteen table so that the other boys wouldn’t see. One day we’ll do just that and ditch this hell-hole forever, Vive used to say.

Escape to New York Escape to New York Escape to New York. The slogan coursed through his head in an endless echo, an appeasing balm. He pictured himself in a church streaming Gregorian chants and his mind emptied of the angry head, the sympathetic head. I am in New York.

And it could only be Cynthia. Cynthia and her penchant for pointing fingers at people she chose not to like on first impression. She must detest him now, the thirty-two-year old “boy” who had, for years, straddled her daughter between indefinite co-existence and matrimony’s concrete dignity; she had one more bullet to slug him with.

I told you, make her cancel her flight, wait a few more days... You just took it easy, didn’t even suggest it to her! Oh, of all the stupid, STUPID... HOW COULD YOU? How could you not know! Guilt still ran through him in cold rivulets, like tiny potent shocks, and when the sting of it abated it lingered all over him in a fog of permanent despair.

A doctor- You dare call yourself a doctor!

He mumbled a hello.

“Hah-low? Daddy?” Only, it was Ethan’s voice, burning his ears in a crystalline song. Nausea cloyed his throat. I’m so sorry, he wanted to say, I’m so sorry we’ve had you at all.

“Hah-low? Hah-looow?” the phone persisted.

“Hey, sweetie-boy,” he managed to utter, using Vive’s habitual term, “why are you calling so early?”

And where on earth are you calling from.

There was an impish chuckle on the other line, speckled with glitches from the feedback of the receiver. “I’m at Auntie Soo’s house. Ah Ma and Auntie Soo are playing mah-jong now. Shhh.”

He didn’t know what to say. Ethan, the maths phenomenon, the piano prodigy, who at barely six could already master algebraic equations and “Requiem for a Dream”, was infantile to the magnitude of Consequence. He never once asked for Vive; it was, he assumed, childish ignorance that Daddy and Mummy would always come home to him. Ethan held the belief that life was as simple, and as constant, as the black and white of his piano keys.

Once when Vive was angry she told him that it was the black keys, the sharps and flats, which never went wrong. The ivory ones didn’t allow for trip-ups; a small misstep could ruin the whole composition. White exposed and black concealed.

So keep everything black, Vive had snapped. That way, I wouldn’t need to know that you regretted fathering him.

He had tried to explain himself- that Vive had got it all wrong, that he loved the kid, wouldn’t give him up for the world. That Ethan’s intrusion into their unyielding, nascent prime was a petty matter of flawed timing. That was all he had meant to say, and to some extent, it was true.

And yet.

And yet. If he could do it to bring Vive back — My god.

Unthinkable. He cursed himself bitterly. Fucking unthinkable.

“Daddy, why are you swearing?” the effervescent voice on the line shrivelled, “Issit I make you angry?”

His fingers paled taut around the mobile. “No, Daddy’s not angry,” he blabbered, “I was just- was...” He gave up and changed the subject. “Have you eaten?”

“Ah Ma let me have MacDonald’s today ‘cause only MacDonald’s was open! I had cheeseburger,” the voice bubbled, “and I got the last Shrek! I saw everyone else got Donkey, but only I got Shrek and Shrek is my favourite...”

Fuck MacDonald’s, he thought, solace and repulsion washing through his heart. A part of him wanted to board the earliest plane home and smother the child with hugs. Of love or guilt, he couldn’t tell.

“Daddy, guess what?” Ethan’s sparkling timbre mellowed to a whisper. It drew him in like a beckoning secret, as if he wasn’t the parent anymore but a trusted old comrade. Unconsciously he lowered his head and cupped the phone closer to the lapels of his jacket.

“What?” He whispered back, brimming with the anticipation of a playmate. He thought he could have gone mad.

“You know your sissiphone?” “Mm-hm?”

“I made it new.”

He paused. “You made it new.”

“Yah!” “You mean you broke it.” And immediately he regretted his accusation, for he realised that the silence mocking his ears smacked not of sheepishness, but of anger, and shock.

“Ethan,” he cracked it gingerly, “Ethan, Daddy’s sorry. You didn’t break it.” The phone remained noiseless, stubborn.

“Sweetie, are you there?” Oh my god what have I done. He couldn’t tell if the child was still hanging onto the conversation, and yet again he found himself wallowing in his own damning shame.

Unless, of course, silence meant that Ethan had not made any movement from his position, the heavy cordless phone still lugged atop the child’s shoulder– in the way he imagined it to be.

Then there was a soft rustling noise over the background, and in a burst of fright he blurted crazily, “don’t put the phone down! We have to talk!”

“Dowan!” the child snapped, “you only say that ‘cause you feel bad. You always anyhow say me, and you don even listen to me–” “No, sweetie, I really want to talk to you, just–” “I HATE YOU!” Ethan screamed. Inevitably, the background flickered with unwanted life. He could hear Cynthia’s reedy cry, coarsened and nasal with age. “Ah-boy ah,” she was saying, “who you talking to?”

He felt the mobile slip a notch down in his grip, its wet slickness salting his devastated nerves. Cynthia was going to tear it all down; whatever was left of their featherweight bond, and she was going to rip him apart for Ethan the moment the child ended the call, and she was going to make sure Ethan knew that it was all Daddy’s bloody fault...

“TV!” Came Ethan’s dampened yell, and everything was silent once more. He leant against a Christmas display window to catch his breath; he was laughing so inexplicably hard, choking on mute beams of relief. You still love me after all. And he clung on to this final lifeline at parental respect, relishing the weight of expectancy enveloping his son’s waiting quiet.

When Vive had delivered the news that they were expecting, he had pictured his dreams of medical specialisation going up in smoke. Say something, Vive’s elation had drained away, why do you look so troubled? He had forced out a smile, and tried to lie that he was equally ecstatic. Yet for every saccharine pledge of support he had retched up, Vive had grown increasingly subdued.

There was a long, terse silence after she had stared him down to his last stutter, and his guilt had seared so brightly he could no longer return her gaze. At last she sighed and drew him into her arms, and the next thing he knew he was awash with kisses of forgiveness. I didn’t ask you to marry me, you know, she had whispered, so don’t you dare see the baby as an inconvenience.

He tried. But while he made it a point to remember his son’s birthday (it was the first day of his medical finals), Vive made it a point to plan the parties. While he fixed the kid’s breakfast on his days off, Vive taught Ethan to fashion sculptures from cookie dough. While he ferried the boy to school, Vive raced Ethan home after his lessons. While he was the one who taught the child how to read, it was Vive who spun the stories that kept Ethan awake in bed. He could pride himself on never displaying any anger towards his son, but no matter how calm and logical and eventempered he was in contrast to her blistering impetuousness, it was Vive whom Ethan looked up to.

Always.

“Hey Ethan,” he said unthinkingly, “I’ve a story about a mynah, and a fan.”

“Did it die?” Ethan questioned, forgetting himself.

“You’ve got to hear the beginning first,” he replied, mentally working out how to start the account. “The mynah, it was on its first flight out. ‘Happened that its nest was located in a tree on our school compound. And that tree was right outside the canteen.”

He paused. “So the mynah flew out the tree and into the canteen.

The ceiling of the canteen was covered with fans, all buzzing at full speed.” There was an audible catch of breath at the other end of the line.

“Auntie Lynn was there,” he added as an afterthought, thinking it would comfort Ethan to know that his trusty twin sister, who loved spoiling Ethan with branded presents, had been a key witness, “and she said that it was dipping in and out of the crowds of students. Then, it decided to fly higher.”

“How come Auntie Lynn didn’t tell it to fly lower?”

“She didn’t think that it was going to hit a fan.” “Then? Then?”

“There was this really loud explosion,” he carried on, spewing out his sister’s words, “and a whole mess of feathers. Everyone thought it got killed and decided that its body had to be lying somewhere near.”

“But it exploded! So the body is everywhere! Like maybe the feet is here and the wing is there... and maybe bones, because birds’ bones are porous! And blood-” “That’s right, Ethan,” he smiled, “That was what I thought.”

Of the few traits that he and Ethan shared in common, it was their fascination with anatomy. He couldn’t explain what exactly it was that made ligaments and tissue and capillaries so mesmerising, but the elaborate delicacy with which he had to careen through brittle shells of tracheal cartilage and filigreed blood vessels always gave him a sense of impregnability. Like that of God. “Did Auntie Lynn find the mynah?”

“No sweetie, no one found the body that morning,” he said, “only its head.” He could still remember his sister’s repulsion. The guy said that its eyes were still blinking. Can you believe it? The truth was no one else actually saw the disturbed contents of that noodle bowl. For what they knew, the fellow was dramatising the incident for all its worth.

Yet he always believed in the story’s veracity. “Someone had just bought a bowl of noodles, and it was steaming hot. As he sat there slurping his soup,” he paused dramatically, “something fell in...”

“HE ATE THE HEAD!” Ethan screamed, much to his long-awaited, ill-deserved pleasure.

He equated surgery to a mechanic’s assembly of a car engine.

Dehumanising your patients, Vive had joked, sometimes I don’t know whether they’re mortal lives to you or not. They are, he had said, it’s just that they don’t come under me to expire. In his six years of surgical practice, he had no direct deaths. Vive had let out a wry chuckle. Some cars you just can’t fix, she had said, especially the ones in your own garage.

It happened two days before her flight.

She was packing her luggage, wads of now-indispensible tissue in one hand. He was recounting the antics of a particular patient to her, the one who got cold feet minutes before surgery, and he was too absorbed in his story to realise that she wasn’t listening. It was only after he waited for a reaction that he saw she was staring at the tissue in mild shock; crimson blooms on the napkin she was balling up for disposal, drying russet on their pallid canvas. “Vive!” he exclaimed, jolting her to feigned nonchalance. She laughed it off, blaming her flu on a lack of sleep in preparation for the exhibition in New York.

She had been running a temperature since the start of the week, and still she oversaw the logistics of her art showcase and breathed fumes of turpentine and fixatives and emulsions. She still carried on with her six-kilometre morning jogs. He advised her to rest with the knowledge that she wouldn’t. It was the flu; let it run its course.

He would meet her in New York the day before her exhibition. He didn’t know what her show was about; Vive had insisted it remained a surprise. It’d better be a pleasant one, he had sulked.

That would depend on your mood, darling.

At the airport, he told her to call him when she landed. She rolled her eyes, and he saw in that gesture of mock annoyance the wonderful, teasing girlish air to which he had fallen for in junior college, all those years ago.

You know I always do, she replied with a gentle flippancy.

At the airport it was just the two of them, just like old times, with no one else- no responsibilities, no Ethan- to break that luxury. Take care, he told her, and that was all.

It was the U.S. ground-staff who called. He had been having a late break after a stream of uninterrupted patients, and seeing Vive’s number glowing on the dial he had felt mildly relieved. The bewilderment over this dry, scratchy, American-accented appeal that if he was family to Ms Vivien Low could he please make arrangements to fly over immediately, there has been a medical emergency, quickly struck him cold with terror.

He booked the first flight out, still dressed in his work attire, with a black overcoat strewn atop his hand luggage. Cynthia had been nothing short of hysterical, and had yelled at him to tell her more; what had Vive been diagnosed with, how short was the route to the hospital from JFK, and was there anything he could do since he was a cardiothoracic specialist and why the hell had he not found out what was wrong with her in the first place. He made Cynthia

take charge of Ethan in the hope that the boy would placate and foster in her some sort of emotional self-restraint (he would have preferred very much to have put Ethan at his parents’ place). He had not had the guts to know any more than he needed to; another detail swelling the seriousness of the situation and he would have lost it altogether.

It was a twenty-three-hour flight. At the stopover in Frankfurt, he checked his cell phone. There were sixteen missed calls, all from Vive’s mobile, and no new messages. He thought of waiting for the seventeenth call to materialise, but then decided that the suspense would be too much to bear. Feeling like a small child dreading abandonment, he dialled the only number he had memorised from his phone list, and waited for a foreign hand to pick up the line.

“Daddy, did the mynah feel anything?” He pictured what the child could see; the graphic tearing of flesh and bone, the spray of extremities and ligaments that were only inevitable with something so fragile and light hitting blades as potent as metal shards. Yet if the head took the first hit, how then would the thing be able to feel its body disintegrating, with nerves that no longer connected with the brain-the brain which felt and registered pain.

“No, I think it happened too fast,” he replied. “I don’t think it even knew it had an accident.”

“Oh,” said Ethan, “so it died happy.”

“That’s right.”

Vive’s exhibition was held at the Chelsea Art Museum. He arrived late, when the opening had already commenced, and visitors and guests were flocking around her works like moths that shadowed the cast of a lamp. The gallery director had received the news only the evening before, but she handled it well and the showcase ran

like butter. She offered her condolences when she realised who he was, and was kind enough to personally explain each and every one of Vive’s pieces to him. The theme, she said apologetically, was rather vague, but it had something to do with fate-changing accidents.

Decapitation. That was the title of her show. The loss of sight, sound, smell, taste, hearing. Every piece she constructed had to do with touch, warmth and cold. There were isolated works depicting uselessness, like the sorry state of a keyless piano in a dark corner, and others that seemed to simulate normalcy, like a double-bed that crumbled black into the white floor on one half but was fully functional on the other; it was still a bed, and people were invited to sit on it. He realised that for every one of the items that attempted to fulfil their purposes, there was always the presence of an extra factor: companionship, the remedy for coping with otherwise fatal circumstances.

Then the director led him to the last installation. It was a standard work table, with a sewing machine that had been fashioned from an antique birdcage, and it was choking with shreds of deep red felt. Neatly folded on a chair, at the end of the table, was his burgundy scarf. And right away he knew it was a work whose story, and meaning, would be known only to the two of them, and he understood her intent. The title was simple and blatant, “Don’t Forget To Wear It”.

It was Vive who found it drawing bloodied circles on the school courtyard. Where its head once perched was a gurgling crater of shredded muscle and bone, and it flailed about in a crazed and broken state. Vive took it home and kept it in an archaic cage, where it bashed itself blindly, violently, against the flimsy bars over and over again, knocking over the useless ceramic water dish. It lasted all of two hours and died after one final shot

against the dented wooden dome, expiring in the same ceaseless hysteria that possessed it after its freakish decapitation.

Vive had always wondered if there were people who got meted with the same circumstances as that wretched bird. She had always wondered what they would do. They will kill themselves because they are alone in suffering. The morning she buried the failed rescue attempt in a grass patch at the foot of her block was also the morning when the first November rains obliterated the unwelcome tropical heat.

“Daddy, when you come home you teach me how to play your sissiphone, okay?” Ethan’s screeches had melted into a gentle, flowing, pleading stream.

“If you’re really serious about it,” he conceded reluctantly. The instrument had been there, at a nondescript corner of the living room; a corner that the child had walked past thousands of times without so much as a glance at its sorry state, and now Ethan was expressing an unfounded keenness about it that slightly unsettled him.

“Sweetie, is there any reason for you wanting to play it?” he questioned cautiously, and added, not wanting to appear distrustful, “I could get you a new one, you know.”

“I dowan.”

“Why not?” “‘Cause it’s different.”

“Ethan, it’s old. It’s not even going to sound in tune when it’s played. I’ll get you your own, okay, so you can-”

“It’s for the funeral.” His son’s voice had dropped to a whisper as damaging as rock to glass. He felt his throat constricting, sharp and tight; a stranglehold, on his voice box. My son knows, he thought. My son knows what he has lost, and still he tries to keep up a five-year-old’s front. My son knows why I am away, and that is why he isn’t asking me for presents. My son knows that only I will be returning, alive and well and guilty.

My son knows, and he didn’t hear it from me.

“She wanted me to learn it ‘cause she said that I would play it like you. She said she missed you playing it.

“If I play it, she will come back, right? I heard what she said to you that day. She will come back. ‘Cause she knows that you taught me, and she will be so happy, and I know what she said to you is true... ‘cause she said she never lies to you... And she will come back and she will be alive... ‘cause it happened to... to Lazarus before... I got hear in school ... see? ... she’ll come...back...”

Then there was no more coherence. He heard Ethan’s stifled weeping. It was piteous and hopelessly relentless.

You brought everything to life when you played it, she had told him, why did you stop?

Daddy’s here, he wanted to say, don’t cry.

But he didn’t, and instead he stood stiffly on the pavement with the phone plastered to his ear, with Ethan’s crying coursing over his head like a river that was bent on drowning him as well. And then he heard Cynthia’s rakish holler clawing from a distant cavern of the house, sharp with agitation. “Ah Boy! What happened?” There was the pound of hurried soles slapping on

linoleum, and it got louder and louder, until it fizzled out with a woman’s biting intake of breath. “Want to talk to your Daddy yet want to cry on the phone,” he heard Cynthia snap, “might as well not talk to him lah!” There was a brief, voiceless tussle with the cordless, and he knew in that instant that his conversation with his son was over.

“Don’t you dare make things worse by bringing Vive up,” Cynthia scowled, in the effortlessly perfect English she always reserved for him, and he felt powerless in her presence. “The boy has heard enough.”

“You’re too much,” he muttered weakly.

“I want to know which plane the casket is on, the arrival timeeverything. Call only when you’ve got the details confirmed. If not, don’t bother.” There was a brusque click, and the line was off before he could even think of countering her. Small, meek, and stupid. That was what he felt, and that was what he was.

The autopsy had arrived that morning. It was pneumonia; he should have known. He couldn’t imagine how Cynthia would react to that. Perhaps she would shut up if he just summed everything up as septic shock; that way, confronted with a term she wasn’t familiar with, she would be limited in her capacity for soap-box drama. What he had to worry about, at present, was the fading daylight.

He had just reached Riverside Park, and already much of the sky had solidified into a damning indigo, the last streaks of rose retreating fast into the horizon. Shivering despite his heavy overcoat, he headed for the metal barriers, where the evening impaled itself through the sombre glaze of the Hudson River.

He would be landing in Changi on Wednesday. He wondered whether Ethan would be waiting for him at the entrance of the arrival hall. And then he chided himself for hoping such. Hurry up and focus, you piece of shit.

But his shoe treaded on something soft.

His scarf had undone itself and drifted to the frosted pavement, and dark beads of melted snow were beginning to dull its passionate burgundy hue. He felt a dazzling rush of pain, whitehot, blinding, rippling through his chest; a pain so physically acute he could have fooled himself into thinking he was in the throes of a cardiac arrest. And so he focused his mind on the 69th Street Transfer Bridge in all its rugged glory, praying that its postcard romanticism would ease him into a cocoon of imagined old-world glamour, away from a grief that hurt like crazy.

That focus dissolved once his fingers brushed the fallen scarf, and all that was swarming through his head now were marvels on why people were always asking him where the cashmere was dyed in.

Cashmere. Yeah, right.

He came into the art room drenched from head to toe, the rainwater puddling around his sodden canvas sneakers. He threw his saxophone case on the table, and the contents rapped in frightful protest. What happened? The art students crowded around him.

Hasn’t your competition started already? Then they saw that he was gripping, crushing, his spare inhaler, angry cracks spreading and splintering the plastic, and they grew silent.

“I’m cold,” he sighed at last, in exhaustion, in resignation.

And she gathered all the scraps around her and ran them through the yellowed Singer, her hands zigzagging this way and that, going the way her thoughts ricocheted. She floored the pedal to the point of damage, as if strength could drive the machine faster. In thirty

seconds it was done, and she brought the half-metre strip to him, roping it around his neck and tucking it down the collar of his uniform. “Nah. It’s warmer now, right?” she smiled.

It was felt, his scarf; his amulet against the ravages of a decapitation she had always feared would happen to him. He choked out a laugh. That’s it, louder man. Take giant gulps of air and give it all you’ve got. After all, the body can’t distinguish between false and genuine mirth; endorphins are released and catecholamines are lessened all the same. In time the laughing would become natural, and he would be left not remembering how much it took of him to create his own bliss. Harder and harder he convulsed, until his lungs gave out and finally, thank god- finally, silenced his unyielding sobs.

When he felt composed enough he brought out the pale urn he had been sheltering in the safety of his overcoat. It felt smooth and light and cold. He had to fumble a bit with the seal, but he did it quickly and tipped the contents of the urn into the water, crossing himself in silent prayer as wisps of those cindered ashes melted into the embrace of their liquid grave, into the river’s dark currents, into nothing. Angry clouts of wind snatched at the trails of his scarf, and they shot out to the air like kites ridding of their strings; the harder they quivered in suspended flight, the firmer the embrace of the entwined felt, still warm, around the cool of his neck.

Frogspawn Spring is spawning Eyes, high-strung Snowdropping on the strand.

Within each drop the strands untwine, split, scatter, shrill open sentences sun-beamed and breasting on star spray.

Unmade they sit on spitting brooks and still ponds, winking behind film magic – eyes black and brooding soft – silvered on the sky’s crest. See them See. See egg within eye within eye within egg, counting down one, two, four, eight.

Tham Zheng Teng

Night Terror Some days you only taste blood on your tongue – The warm, metallic copper tang that takes you back to the hunt, The same war fought over and over again: the same arrows, the same guns Relived night after night in restless dreams, Like drowning; like water in your lungs.

And when you wake screaming with your hands around my throat I can only offer a lullaby, which may not soothe you to sleep, Nor keep you safe. It only passes the time – those slow, dark hours before dawn, With fear as an impulse, a primal instinct bred from something old, Something deep in our bones; a constant knell.

There shall no more be the illusion of sanguine skies, Of perfect pastures on a warm summer’s day, Snapshots of a past reconciled with another history That belongs six feet underground; Peace is a privilege for the dead.

Amanda Lee

Announcements ______________________________________________________________________

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Issue 7 (August 2013) This is not so much a ‘call’ as general notification, but…

Symbal is open for submissions 24/7, 365.25 days a year.

We are privileged to serve as a platform for: -

Creative writing pieces from any conceivable genre or theme.

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Commentaries and treatises on the literary arts and scene.

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Visual art, photography and photo-manipulation.

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Anything related to the above may be considered really; but kindly liaise with us first.

Our writers can be: -

NUS undergraduate as well as graduate students

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Students of any local tertiary institution

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Tertiary students pending matriculation

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National Servicemen

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NUS staff

For submission details, please take note of our guidelines in the following pages. As always, the editorial team can be reached at <symbalmagazine@gmail.com>, or the Symbal Facebook page. We thank you for your interest in our publication.

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Submission Guidelines Submission of Literary Works Symbal welcomes works from NUS undergraduate and graduate students, staff, students from other tertiary institutions (local junior colleges, polytechnics, ITEs, and other universities) and even those who are serving their national service. Unlike other publications, we welcome any kind of work that is of literary value regardless of whether it is poetry, prose, dramatic extract, commentaries or treatises.

Due to space constraints, however, we would like the writers to observe the following guidelines: Poetry – Any form of poetry is welcomed but do keep it within two pages of a Word document. Longer submissions will be given secondary priority.

Prose – Any genre is acceptable, but try to keep the word count between 500-4000. We will consider longer or shorter pieces, but these will be given secondary priority. If you would like to submit a much longer piece such as a novella, please provide us with a summary of your work (and the full text, if possible). Do bear in mind that your piece will be serialised, with the content spread between a number of issues.

Dramatic Extract – It should consist of no more than 4 scenes.

It is advisable that the scenes should for the most part be able to stand on their own (i.e. the reader should be able to make out what is generally going on as well as the relationship(s) between the characters). Of course, if you would like to submit a monologue, you are more than welcome to do so.

Submission Guidelines Commentaries/Treatises: Kindly keep to the word limit of 4000 words. Do note that your submission must be relevant to the literary arts; expositions on a particular book/author, commentaries on the state of literature in the education system / country, or even reflections on a particular literary event are accepted.

As we aim to give budding writers a platform to showcase their works, we will accept submissions that have already been published or entered in competitions as long as they do not contravene any guideline of the other party. Do note that it is your sole responsibility to ensure this. Should we come to the knowledge that you have contravened the guidelines of another publication or organisation, we will remove your work immediately. By the same token, you are free to submit the same work to other publications or competitions as long as the other party is agreeable to it.

Symbal reserves first serial and anthology rights. We may also consider publishing your work in other mediums, but will contact you in advance for approval. We will not publish or modify your work without seeking your consent.

When to Submit Symbal is a quarterly publication, and is always open for submissions. However â&#x20AC;&#x201C; if you would like us to consider your piece for a particular issue â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it is recommended to send it at least a month before that issue is due for release. This will give our editors time for reviewal and compilation. We will then reply you with regard to whether your work has been approved for publication. Unfortunately, space restrictions may still prevent us from doing so until a subsequent issue.

Submission Guidelines # Submission of photographs/illustrations What is a magazine without some pictures or illustrations? If you would like an avenue to showcase your artistic abilities, we will be delighted to help! All forms of photos, drawings and paintings are welcome. However, do bear in mind that Symbal currently lacks a dedicated section for the featuring of visual art. Unless you have submitted creative writing or a descriptive passage to complement the piece, it will be published in a given issue only if space permits, or if it is relevant to an already featured theme or work. However, do check back on the submission guidelines from time to time as there may be a section calling for visual art / photography in the future.

Submitting an image to us will be an indication of your agreement to grant us the rights to retain it (you will still be credited when it is used). Your work will not be edited without permission; however it may be rotated, flipped, or resized.

How to Submit Send all your works to symbalmagazine@gmail.com. The subject title should be prefaced as follows: “Submissions: <title of work>”. Please submit your works in the body of the email or in an attached word document (do note that PDF files will not be accepted). You are highly encouraged to append a short personal biography of about 50 – 100 words to the email.

Should you have further enquiries, kindly write to us via the same email address and preface the subject heading with “Enquiries: <area of concern>”.

We seek your cooperation in following this template so as to allow us to sort the mail easily. Thank you.

Credits: Cover image from http://wallpaperstock.net/ilove-bokeh-wallpapers_w27972.html