The Unbeliever

By Sonia B. SyGaco

The motorcycle skidded over the narrow dirt road’s potholes.

 If she hadn’t been on the gas tank’s side saddle, she’d be hanging between the bushes, like her companions she could now hear screaming from the branches, where they’d been thrown. She knew that would happen.

 She’d just come from town.

**

“Will you Ms Mary buy these things for us until Felix recovers from pneumonia?”

 Unable to decline the request, she took the first morning trip at 5, on this modified motorcycle the highlanders called  habal-habal. It could squeeze six passengers onto its wooden plank at the rear. She hoped to return by mid afternoon.

Others muttered about having to teach their first assignment in the hinterlands, but she took this in her stride. Anyway it made a perfect alibi for not going home on weekdays and evading Albert. His stories always ran in circles around “I”. Her family adored him and sadly she hadn’t been able drive him away. Was it because Albert’s family was influential in town that her parents favored him?

“What will I do with you Mary?” Father kept repeating.

“Don’t tell me you will be among the long list of old maids in town.” Mother added.

“Maybe you should open your eyes and give Albert your ‘yes’.” Her elder sister Clarisse suggested.

She was completely Clarisse’s opposite; she turned a deaf ear to their every word. Was something wrong with her that she couldn’t help finding flaws: his face, his clothes, down to his shoes, the way he spoke, as well as the discussion. She knew his family and friends, and finding errors, like this, would eventually lead to dislike.

During college all of her male friends were fools rushing in for advice on love from someone as inappropriate as her with such counselling. They would ask to craft love letters while the girls would seek help on farewell notes. Their love and heart breaking tales -  love was the least she could think of.

A heart’s content : that’s how she described her simple life in the mountains. During harvest season, the students brought her some things and in return, she gave remedial lessons after class.

Today, she felt lighthearted, promising to arrive in town before sundown. As soon as the habal-habal came into view, eager, she didn’t hesitate to hop in. Along the trip it began to drizzle, until the steep terrain made riding difficult.

**

The motorcycle skidded over the potholes of the narrow dirt road.

She raised her long wet disheveled hair from the man’s face. She looked but did not notice him. All this time she had taken for granted this habal-habal driver in many of her travels. He’d always asked her to take a seat on the gas tank side saddle. At every bump in the ride his hands on the accelerator handle and his arms would touch her skin.

Brushing down dirt from her clothes, she stood up without a word.

She thought: Thomas. That’s his name. Thomas.


© 2010 Sonia B. Sygaco

Sonia B. SyGaco is a fiction writer. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing at Silliman University in the Philippines. Her creative works have appeared in Philippine Free Press and Philippine Graphic Magazine.

Lighter

  

Lighter

by O Thiam Chin

The two men looked at the body on the bed, and at one another, before looking somewhere else, one at his hands, and the other out the windows. Nobody spoke for a long time, each waiting for the other person to end the silence. The bedroom smelled of unwashed hair, body sweat, and a palpable odour of residual violence. A while ago, the room was forcefully charged, imbued with an unaccountable aggression, and now, it was unnaturally quiet, like the calm after a storm.

     The man who had been sitting on the edge of the bed, who had been staring out the windows, got up and moved towards the bright afternoon lights pouring into the room. He felt like he was entering into another dimension, stepping into the warm membrane of lights. He kept his back to the body on the bed. He was the one who had tossed the torn blanket across the body, to hide its nakedness. It was strange, he mused, that a woman’s body could be revealed in so many ways, under so many conditions, to possess qualities that were so extreme: sexiness or secrecy, life or death.

     He finally spoke: ‘We better do something before my wife comes back.’

    The other replied, leveling his gaze cautiously on the peripheral outline of the woman’s feet, dangling out of the bed, not daring to venture anywhere beyond it, noticing the red, garishly-painted toe-nails, with a controlled voice: ‘Yes, we should.’

     Then they were silent again, receding back into their dark caves of thoughts.

     The other man took out his crumpled pack of Camels and withdrew a stick. He searched his pockets for the lighter, but couldn’t find it. He looked around, and then hesitatingly peered up at the bed, trying hard to blur out the reality of the woman’s body. Thankfully, the pillow was still on the woman’s face, hiding it from view. He could still see the imprint of the palm on the indented pillow; whose was it, who held it down? He couldn’t remember now; his memory was a blank slate.

     Unfortunately, he also caught the sight of her broken right hand that had extended out of the blanket, still clenched with rage and surprise. And near it, the lighter, lying just out of reach. He decided not to smoke, though the itch in his throat was getting to him.

     ‘It’s getting late. She’s coming back soon. Let’s do something.’ The man didn’t move away from the windows. He remained immobile where he stood.

     ‘Yup, we better do something.’ The other man got up from the floor, and gathered the woman’s clothes – a black slip-on, bra and crotch-less panties - into a neat pile and placed it on her outstretched hand. He adjusted the blanket to cover her feet. With the dead body fully covered, the grotesque display of lifeless flesh put out of sight, he felt much better. At least he didn’t feel so bothered by it now.

© 2010 O Thiam Chin 

O Thiam Chin’s short stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Kyoto Journal, The Jakarta Post, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Karavan, Qarrtsiluni, as well as in several literary anthologies. He is the author of two story collections, ‘Free-Falling Man’ and 'Never Been Better’, and his new collection of flash fiction, 'Under The Sun', will be published in 2010.

Avatar Aftermath: Mission Pandora

Avatar Aftermath: Mission Pandora

Prologue

By Hazlan Zakaria

Intrinsically fan fiction, this story also rewrites the original, to portray the other side of the coin à la Eggar’s Wild Things. The narrator Marine Derek Plummer whom everyone assumes is the baddie is fighting for Earth, which will die off without Unobtanium. Plummer’s family is living in the crowded space stations hovering over Earth because it is now so polluted it has to be environmentally regenerated by Unobtanium. But the Avatars and the other creatures have no qualms about the impending fate of the billions like Plummer’s family back on Earth. Plummer has now to fight for the future survival of his family and of the Earth.

Children Of The Dark

Children Of The Dark

By Mmakgari Dabutha 

We are behind when we visit the village. We are reminded by those that stayed of how things are supposed to be. They say things have changed. Yet you know they remain the same. So you have changed. You admire their lives filled with harmony and rich in spirituality. We come with the big cars and the fancy clothes. Sooner or later they get swallowed into the beauty of our lands. They start to mean nothing, because right then and there you just want to dance with the person you once were. You worked so hard to achieve these things, and then you drive home. Home to the village... and none of these matter.

Seconds

Seconds

by Salasiah Radzali

One, two, three.
Three seconds. That's the most she could go without thinking about him.
She was like that every time; her lips would quiver, her hands would shake and her body would shiver as thoughts of him entered her head.
"He is special," she told her friends.
He is her obsession. Her one and only.

Four, five, six.
Six days have passed, and all of her friends were concerned. "Who is he?" they asked. But all they got was a coy glance and a fleeting smile.

Seven, eight, nine.
Nine weeks had come and gone, and she was still in love. Her friends knew about his physical looks: steel grey eyes framed by a head full of lush, red hair, and how he stood tall and thi, like a handsome willow in a field of sunny grass. They have seen the drawings, they have heard the descriptions, but never did they get to see him in the flesh. All of them unanimously concluded that the object of her affection did not exist in real life.

Ten, eleven twelve.
Twelve steps were taken before her girlfriend caught a brief reflection of red at her window. Oh, she exclaimed, he does exist after all! And with that thought in mind, she drove all the way back to her own house, to gossip to her friends on this new piece of information. It was only appropriate, she told them, that she left the lovebirds alone. Who knows what they were doing in her room! she said, with a giggle.

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
Fifteen days had gone when her mother last found her hanging in her room. Her long brown hair was hacked short and dyed an unnatural shade of dark red. There were dye spilled all over the room, and on the day she was found dead, the colour shone eerily beneath her feet, like blood.

© Salasiah Radzali  2009

Salasiah Radzali is a super nerdy person who's really into books, comics, TV shows and Photoshop graphics.

Adrian's Last Song

In this exclusive excerpt from a novel by a local writer Fadzlishah Johanabas Rosli, the main character Adrian is in love with Rina. A Malaysian with a touch of the Irish in him, Adrian is working his gig in a bar, when he meets a talent scout not exactly looking for singing talent ...

The future is bright - and fishy

GROWN UP

by Leon Wing

“I’m only going out for a bit, to get you some nice fish for your dinner. Wouldn’t that be nice, a nice bit of fish?” Mrs Tan wheedled, looking a little closer at her little boy, playing at soldiers on the kitchen floor. Or is it hunting seals, the way he was mauling the teddy bear.

     She already had on her red riding hood, to keep her hair from frizzing and the rest of her from dehydrating; even if the temperature outside was below 30 degrees in the afternoon, said TV Eleven’s weather announcement earlier.

     She wondered how the fish at the market she was taking a walk to would keep. And, these days there were so many new varieties, some with more than two eyes, and sometimes with muscly fins, looking like attenuated arms.

     She shuddered, remembering the last time she was at the fish stall, squatting before a pile of fish. She nearly leapt backwards (as if she herself had gotten extra limbs, like some frog-like legs) when a still-breathing fish stretched its thick arm-like fin up at her face. The fishmonger lady cackled, with glee, “So fresh ah?”

     Had she seen any change about him yet? She was wary he was about to grow out of his present state, being five now. That was normally the stage at which Malaysian children grew out their limbs.

     She then remembered she had to check on his grandmother, who was upstairs, sleeping off the noon lunch. She left her son to his own devices, to climb the stairs.

     No harm would come to him there, now; she’d kept all the sharp utensils out of his way, into locked drawers and cupboards. Most of her furniture were recently reinforced – the expense! – as last week he managed to wrench out a couple of them – the strength children had these days! - and started brandishing the knives around his little brother, who was only one.

     She tippy-toed over to her mother’s bed, and looked. Mother’s eyes were shut tight, and her mouth was opened. Moving closer, she exclaimed, “Oh mother, what big teeth you have!”, and Grandma snapped opened her large eyes and glared out, answering, “The better to eat yo- I mean – to eat the fish you’re getting for dinner.”

     Back downstairs again, she went into the kitchen one last time before heading off to the market.

     “Oh my, what have you done now?”

     She bent over her little boy – he has grown quite a bit, now, she saw – taking in the mess on the floor.

     Not the ruined teddy bear, no. Rather, her other little boy, now all torn up and half chewed off.

     And her surviving little boy now had a new pair of arms.

© Leon Wing 2009

Leon Wing:  When writing this story, I had this theme at the back of my head, of global warming causing harm to humans in the near future. Here in Malaysia, it is hot enough as it is, but in the future the heat is going to frizzle your hair, and then some.  And, the population is mutating, as is the fish we catch as food.   Reminded of those twisted fairy tales of Angela Carter, I threw in some fairy-tale elements -- sort of Angela Carter-meets-Stephen King.  One of the reactions I got from this story is "too stomach-churning for our lunch-time reading crowd". 

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music, as when he writes for Puisy-poesy.

Post-apocalyptic Malaysia

The Chronicles of Professor Merdeka

Part 1: The Mission

by Hazlan Zakaria 

It is as if the universe herself is weeping, and the steady rain her frequent teardrops. All around the dead city resounds a torrential downpour - it is raining cats and dogs. If there are still cats and dogs around anymore.

     And through all this, through the wet haze and curtain, through this tableau of man-made madness and nature's wrath, a solitary figure can be seen flitting in and out of the ruins, gingerly making his way through the long dead monuments of the city once known as Kuala Lumpur.

A car ride which collected an extra passenger

How Does One Drive to Rizal’s

By Hazlan Zakaria

The old Honda lies stranded and idle by the side of the Kota Kemuning road, its driver and passengers locked in titanic battles, shared and personal, diverse and singular, mundane and spectacular...

"Before": a Halloween special

Before

by Leon Wing

Before the rats picked at the blood and flesh on the fragments of her skull dotted all over the rails, before her head got crushed and brain matter splattered all over, and shattered bones, still with some flesh around them, flung everywhere on the rails, before some passengers in the LRT were jerked off their seats when the LRT hit something solid and nearly derailed, before the people waiting to get on screamed and some turned their heads away, before the LRT couldn’t stop from running over her, before she fell off the edge onto the rails below, before she looked out at the buildings beyond, where a little boy would witness from his bedroom window a horrific sight that would traumatise him for days on end, before she trudged up the stairways to the rail platform, before she got up the first landing, before going up the dirty stairs, she slipped and fell, the bottom of her slipper catching onto some rotting piece of fruit someone had spit out because he was duped into buying some old mushy piece of produce, slipping and falling headlong onto the stairs, killing herself.

© Leon Wing 2008

Leon Wing: I've been reading a lot of Samuel Beckett lately, his short prose, mostly.  I wrote this short short a day before Halloween.  I wanted it to have ... well, more gore than normally found in most of my writings (actually the last one has quite a bit of blood), but without those cheesy short sentences, sometimes with screaming exclamations. I wanted a short short with a long long sentence - on a long long grammatical track, waiting to see if I get syntactically derailed - and, in the bargain, happening in reverse order.  Something experimental, something unusual.

Something macabre?

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music. Woo woo hooo! Macabre? Especially when he likes to kill off some of his characters. Gorily.

"Ruth's Heart" by Damyanti Ghosh

Ruth’s Heart

By Damyanti Ghosh

Always hearts, all the hearts, and nothing but the hearts will do. An anthem for Ruth, the ruthless. Golden locks, a knowing, pouting smile, and a body to match, Ruth had ammunition. Her eyes were cold, frozen fish cold, but with a single blow of her glance she could land a heart on her palm, fluttering, helpless, beating fast, calling her name, begging for mercy.

"The Passing" by Damyanti Ghosh

The Passing

by Damyanti Ghosh

She has woken up early today, feeling strangely empty. She buries her face further into the pillow and reaches out for that familiar feeling, the feeling that makes her tremble and spill out in tears every time she thinks of the day they'd met for the last time. 

     He had come into town just that morning, tired, jet-lagged. She had waited for him at a coffee-shop. When he came in she had made as if to rise, and he had bent to kiss her, but not quite made it. In the end they'd both sat down, not touching.

    She can't remember what they talked about, only that she was getting late, the strawberry slush she'd ordered was freezing her lips, and she was hugging her arms. He'd never driven back to the airport immediately after driving into town from it, he'd said, and offered to drop her to the airport where she was going to receive her fiancé. 

    He'd joked about how it was he who should have been the one taking her on her first flight out of the country, but he was at least delivering her to the man who would. He was wearing spectacles instead of the usual contacts, and she'd been conscious of how they must look like to others, her twenty-three years against his fifty-six. 

   She remembers the sun on his tousled, peppery hair, his white shirt, the people at the airport, his wave as he walked away, how she had met her fiancé with a kiss. All of that. 

   But try as she might, she cannot recapture that one thing she's striven so long to forget: that surge of pain, that acute awareness of him that has always pushed against her heart. And just like that, he is gone.

© 2008 Damyanti Ghosh

Creative process: Damyanti Ghosh : I have often seen the moment of falling in love depicted accurately - I wanted to capture the moment of falling out of love, which is subtler. I do not know if it is a process or a moment. It could be a process leading up to a moment.

I usually describe the film inside my head as I write. Most of the time it seems to be done by my pen, not my brain, so there is no particular creative thought process as such. The image that set this particular film running was the memory of a girl sitting alone at a coffee-shop, hugging herself.


Damyanti Ghosh is an established freelance writer, writing for various websites and magazines, who is now trying to figure out a way to step into fiction: a field she has touched before, but never professionally. She has written poetry for quite some time now, and hopes to become a writer some day: not just a published author, but a real writer in the truest sense of the word.

Damyanti's blogs:
http://amloki.blogspot.com
http://damyantiwrites.wordpress.com

"The Smell" by Leon Wing

The Smell

By Leon Wing

She didn’t flush after evacuating, or even wipe herself .  She went to the bureau  in the adjoining room of the apartment, to rifle through the drawers for any clean clothes to put on. She sniffed at her pong, but she thought the smell coming from the kitchen was even worse.

     She had been getting familiar with all the rooms in this apartment for a week now, sleeping in one, then the other. Like Goldilocks and the three bears, she finally found the softest, most comfortable, bed.

     She wasn’t going back to bed, now that she was up, even if the sun wasn’t.  Outside was humid, and dusty ten floors down, in the KL streets. Up here, she made to go into the kitchen, but the smell caused her to gag.

     She had to go in, anyway.  How else was she going to get to the fridge, for something to eat, having finished off any edible stuff around this place?  The last real meal was before there was that smell, when she used the knife, when it was still clean.

     Now, it was dirty.  It was congealed with blood.  She pulled the knife out of the rotting body on the kitchen floor.  She wiped the blood off the blade on her clothes, and sliced some bread up for sandwiches.

© Leon Wing 2008

Creative process: Leon Wing:  I wrote this while facebooking with someone.  When our conversation finished so did this short story.  I was not composing it in my usual manner, which is long complex syntax, as with my other pieces.  This time I wanted to get the story down fast without thinking too much about style, grammar, sentence structure; all those linguistics gimmicks (pun!).   I dashed this off in the fashion of flash fiction – or whatever people now term these types of writing – short shorts, micro fiction, flash fiction, 1-minute, 20-minute (from McSweeney’s).

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music. However, he does write  fiction, at times, like this time.

Short fiction from Damyanti Ghosh

Results of some prose exercises:

The Summer Storm

Robert's wife has no idea when the light blue sky has turned a threatening, sombre gray-black. As if someone has gone and smeared a lot of chimney-soot on its face, she says to herself, her hand automatically reaching up to touch her own. Laying there on the grass with the sooty sky bearing down on her, she thinks of Robert. She thinks of his arms as he had held her last summer in this very meadow, how they'd made love, laughed, fed each other from the small basket she'd brought along, the mingling smells of a thousand honeysuckles around them.

    She has gone back in time, dreaming, when a movement catches her eye: a foal at the water's edge, drinking from the small brook, all by itself. She wonders where its mother is. She decides it is probably time she returns home, to the empty house Robert has left her in, to follow that harlot he'd met at the fair: the doctor's daughter, fair-haired, light-skinned, tall, and slim - everything Martha is not.

    Martha has become Poor Martha, Poor dear Martha. Martha, the wronged, abandoned wife. Every eye in the village has touched her with silent but heavy sympathy as she's trudged her fat belly on swollen legs to and from the market, to fetch milk, or to order new clothes when the old ones did not fit any more.

    Anything, dear God, but pity. Anything, but another "Poor dear". Martha, her jaw clenched, thinks of how well she has put a stop to all that today. She gets up, brushes off the grass from her dress. As she walks over to the brook, the foal skitters away, neighing.

    She takes one last look at the bundle under the stone. A big, fat raindrop falls on her arm just then, but she takes no notice. They will find it soon enough, she thinks, as she looks at the bits of cloth flowing out from under the smooth stone she's chosen. Mrs. Brown will recognize the mittens and the cap for "Martha's poor baby." Mrs. Kilshaw would see the old baby quilt she handed down for the "poor fatherless child." What a waste, really.

    But the proud father is returning today and the house would be empty no more. He will ask for his son, she is sure, before he asks for forgiveness. Better walk down to the village then, it is almost time he is here. She can always send someone back to fetch his darling blue-white son from the brook.

    The storm gathers and begins to blow in earnest, the rain soaking Martha so she looks as if she has never been dry. On her hair and clothes and skin the rain flows in rivulets, making it seem like she is crying from all the parts of her body but her eyes. She hums under her breath, and walks like a woman on a stroll in the meadows, taking in the smells of summer.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Anna's Day

Anna is tired, so for dinner she throws together some pasta, loving its white body, its rough-smooth texture. She slurps in a strand, checking if it is al dente, burning her tongue. She thinks of the things she did today, the uniforms, the scrubbing rooms, the conversations. She sets the pasta to drain and stirs up the sauce, the red tomatoes reminding her of the blotches on the white towels as the little girl bled on her table. Anna's table.

    The girl bled, bled, bled, making the nurses scurry here and scurry there, looking for clips, more towels. But Anna had cut into the wrong place, a main artery, so near the heart that it would pump blood, keep pumping it out, unaware of the blood spilled.

    Anna makes herself turn to the pasta, now drained, white, but no longer inviting, the spaghetti strands flowing like bloodless veins. They have gelled into a gooey mess, sticky-gooey, and the pale white looks too much like the white girl's white face, and the whiteness of her father as colour drained out of him.

    Anna mixes the sauce into the pasta, stirring it slowly, willing it back to life, then gives up. She picks up the whole lot, chucks it into the bin. She switches off the kitchen light, which has begun to give her a headache, and walks out towards the patio to have a drink.

© 2008 Damyanti Ghosh

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Creative process: Damyanti Ghosh : These were the result of writing exercises given out by Sharon Bakar. In both of these, the first sentence comes from a series of writing prompts. This sentence then becomes the first line of your piece.

For instance, for Anna's Day, the prompts were:
A feeling: Tired
A colour: White
A food: Pasta
A sound: Honk
A texture: Rough

Something you've said or thought today: Have a nice vacation

An object you've handled: Cell phone

The name of a person you know or have known: Anna

I was then asked to write a sentence using as many of the words as possible, with a minimum of three.

This was my sentence:

Anna is tired, so for dinner she throws together some pasta, loving its white body, its rough-smooth texture.

I guess my brain kind of short-circuited a bit, trying to connect disparate things. The prompt words used for The Summer Storm story were: wife, light blue, sombre. I basically got the stories down in speed-writing bursts of ten minutes each, and then polished and cut out the excess.

Damyanti Ghosh is an established freelance writer, writing for various websites and magazines, who is now trying to figure out a way to step into fiction: a field she has touched before, but never professionally. She has written poetry for quite some time now, and hopes to become a writer some day: not just a published author, but a real writer in the truest sense of the word.

Damyanti's blogs:
http://amloki.blogspot.com
http://damyantiwrites.wordpress.com

Damyanti also writes poems. Read two of them here.

Breadfruit by Yusuf Martin

Breadfruit

by Yusuf Martin

There were times I would sit and stare out at the spindly breadfruit tree, knowing how hard the soil is and just how difficult it must be for those roots to push against the compacted soil; aided only by infrequent rain and chicken drop pellets. Other times the harshness of the sun would prevent my gaze, even if I cupped my hand over my eyes, trying to shield them from its rays, but still the blazing sun would strike through my pinkened fingers and pain my eyes, making them dry.

    In the evenings, when it was a little cooler outside, I would sit in the gazebo and listen to the children playing by the ditch. I could hear their little squeals and squeaks of joy as they played with the water, or traced patterns on the hard earth then run laughing up the road to see the two white ducks waddling, uncaring.

    I’m not sure if I missed her most then, or all those other times she was away. Maybe it was all of them. Maybe I just couldn’t find one single occasion when I missed her more than any other, they were all equally as lonely, melancholy.

    I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t or wouldn’t put that burden upon her. I didn’t want her to feel bad about leaving us. I wanted her to know that she was missed sufficiently, enough, but no more. I felt, in a way that was my duty towards her, to swallow the emptiness I felt when she wasn’t there, I owed her that, surely.

    That day, before she left again, we walked in the drying garden as she pointed out a fruit bud on the breadfruit tree, smiled, put her hand on mine, looked me straight in the eyes and said, I know.

© 2008 Yusuf Martin


Creative process:  Yusuf Martin: I wanted to write a prose poem/ flash fiction story about love.

Often you only get to realise how much you love someone by how much you miss them when they are not there, so I projected that into a story about missing someone, loving and in a strange way fulfillment too.

The dryness of the garden is barrenness, the feeling of being drained, dry, not fulfilled until your lover is with you, empty, thirsting but not necessarily in a passionate way.

The heat of the sun is not the heat of passion but the heat of longing, of wanting, in a way it is IBAADAT - devotion.

Why the breadfruit tree, to me a pomegranate would have been too obvious and too much about passionate love, too much about eros and not enough about agape.

The two words which make up the name are enough -
bread, staple, stable, that which sustains.
fruit a delight, something which has the very seed of being, a tinge of eternity

The breadfruit tree, like love, is fast growing, and like love the wood is hardy and its fruit sustains life.


Old Hippy, former bookbinder repairer and restorer, dustman, road sweeper, factory worker, mental hospital porter, graphic designer, digital artist, social worker, guest curator at one of London’s most prestigious museums, now exclusively writes short stories and essays from his country home overlooking lakes in the South East Asian countryside.

Yusuf was born in London but lived mostly in East Anglian, England, briefly in India and has finally retired and settled in rural Malaysia, amidst the water buffalo and civets.

He has written several short stories published in collections in Malaysia including Silverfish New Writing 5 (2006); Silverfish New Writing 7 (2008); Urban Odysseys, due shortly from MPH; and an essay for New Malaysian Essays 2, due next year by Mata Hari.

Yusuf Martin is currently putting the finishing touches to a book of short stories about kampung life in Malaysia (Kampung Tales) , writing more fantasy stories about a bomoh (shaman) called Melvyn, magic and ghosts (Melvyn the Bomoh) and a novel based upon his social work experiences (The Unsocial Worker).

Yusuf's sites:
http://mondaymelvyn.blogspot.com/
http://fatmankampung.blogspot.com/
http://correspondences-martin.blogspot.com/

'Untitled' by Ted Mahsun

UNTITLED

by Ted Mahsun

It was already a week into the month of Ramadan, but all Afiq could find in the dark corners of the sprawling town built on the back of the humongous beast Buraq was water to break his fast every evening. The water, whenever it was found, was not clean, and Afiq often had to lick it off the most repugnant of surfaces, such as the walls of an abandoned hut, rotting away, as walls made from the skins of long ago deceased tics were wont to do after a brief period of time; or in huge acrid beads of sweat in between the the beast’s fur, where ever he could find it growing –sometimes in between buildings, other times in between blades of the beast’s fur, growing like tall blades of grass in patches very much like small fields, on the outskirts of the vast decaying Town.

     It was the beads of sweat that kept Afiq going on. He had no doubt the odious and vile liquid excreted from underneath the beast’s back contained some vitamins and minerals – though perhaps limited, it was enough to keep his body alive. His, and other food scavengers, as well.

     The problem with the fur patches outside the Town was that it was getting harder and harder every day of Ramadan to find a big enough bead of beast sweat to last until the next breaking of fast. Competition was stiff. Fights often broke out amongst the scavengers and the militant Jayshists. Afiq had no intention of getting himself mixed up in any of these squabbles. He knew that in his weak state, he would most probably die if ever he got into a fight. That was why he kept his searches mostly within the confines of the Town.

    But that was before he stumbled into the house of the Imam. In his stupor, brought on by his extreme hunger, he had clumsily dragged himself into a district of the Town where he had not gone before. In this part of town, the houses and buildings were made of a different material, something more rugged and longer-lasting than the skins of tics. He did not know what it was but as he slid his palms on the walls while walking between the buildings, the walls felt coarse and slightly elastic, very much unlike the brittle and smooth qualities of tic skins. Even the ground felt different. In other parts of the Town, the ground was soft and springy, as a Buraq’s back should be. But here it was solid and hard and shiny.

    The musty stench in the air quickly gave way to a fragrant aroma, something Afiq’s nostrils had not had the luxury of smelling before. His nose clearly could not cope with this new sensation. Small streams of blood flowed out of his nostrils. He wiped the blood with his grimy wrist and licked it. His mouth started watering. He quickly swallowed the saliva produced. He was not one to waste moisture. He followed the aroma to an open doorway. Inside he saw a sparse room, decorated only with a table and two accompanying chairs, as well as a small black stove in the far corner. On top of the stove, there was a wok, and it was being used to deep-fry something. Attending to the wok was a tall man wearing a white skullcap. This was the Imam.

    The Imam turned around and saw the skinny figure of Afiq standing in the doorway. If the Imam had any change of expression, he did not reveal it. Afiq expected the Imam to burst into a rage, a reaction he was used to getting whenever he appeared in strange doorways. But the Imam did no such thing. He turned his back once again to Afiq and resumed giving his full attention to the wok.

© 2008 Ted Mahsun


Creative process:  Ted Mahsun: The genesis of this story came to be when I was reading up mythological or magical/fantastic elements in Islam. One element that I became very fascinated with was the magical flying horse, Buraq, with which the Prophet Muhammad rode to Jerusalem from Mecca in one night. Despite being able to fly, it was said that this horse had an incredible speed, "who would place its hoof at a distance equal to the range of vision." (According to a hadith.)

Muslims know the rest of the story: at Jerusalem, Muhammad was brought up to the heavens and he goes through something very similar to Danté. (In fact, some people think Danté could have very much been influenced by this story of Lailatul Qadar.)

Anyways, back to the Buraq. The ability for the Buraq to "place its foot at a distance equal to vision" made me realise that a gigantic beast of incredible size could probably do the same. And from there I wanted to write about a gigantic beast called Buraq, so huge that humans could build large settlements on its back and never realise they were on a back of an animal.

In this story, I also wanted to inject a sort of mystical Islamic essence, not unlike the Arabian Nights. I wanted to write fantasy that didn't have the tropes of Western Fantasy. I didn't want to go on the same route as Tolkienism. Neither did I want to go down the more modern fantasy tropes now currently popular in the West, such as Steampunk or New Weird.

I wanted to create something different and underused, and potentially as magical as all the other fantasy tropes. That is why there are militant Jayshists (not necessarily an analogy for al-Qaeda or the Taliban or similar Islamic militants) and there is an imam deepfrying something in a wok. These characters are also there for me to upturn present stereotypical thinking of Muslims...although I haven't got that far in the story for me to get to yet.

The wok is also interesting to me because it signifies something that's very Eastern to me. We Asians like to deepfry our food in woks, and perhaps whatever it is that's being cooked in the wok will be vital to the story, if ever I finish it.


Ted Mahsun is a literary critic, who is a "Reader, Writer, Malaysian. Partial to Haruki Murakami and prone to malapropisms." Visit his blog.