She was planning to make a soup, opening her freezer to get a frozen slab of pig muscles. That's when she found the dead body. Crumpled up inside her freezer, looking a bloody piece of meat from the butcher shop. She almost threw up, except that she was simply too shocked. She kept trying to get one thing straight, How the thing got in her freezer. She had no idea how it came to be so stuffed up in her spotlessly clean kitchen always only full of smell of muffins and fried eggs in the mornings with occasional pancakes. Now confronted with a foreign object inside her territory, she is at loss.

How long has it been in there? Next to her marinated lamb chops, tubs of ice cream and her party ice. Everything was so normal other than the weird object that it all seemed surreal. Should she call the cops? What would they think? She would probably be accused of being a murderer if not, an accomplice in some scandalous business. There was no sign of forced entry into the house, nor it being a practical joke. What should a housewife do upon finding a dead body in her freezer on her Soup-making day? She decided to clean her son's school shoes to distract herself and come back to the problem a while later after recovering from the shock. By 2pm, she was distrubed enough to call her husband to see if he has any clue, or to find out if he has had a part in the horrible business in the freezer.

As she waited for his answer, she thought of what a waste it would be to throw her marinated lambchops away. She had left it marinating for five days. He, as usual, was not in his office. She thought, maybe if she left things alone, everything might eventually return to normal. Whoever or whatever strange twist of fate that had left a dead body in her freezer might clear it up all in good time. But the next time she opened her freezer, it was still there. Next to the now inedible lambchops. That's when she decided to call the police. Thinking that if she turned up at the police station would seem more sincere, she baked a cake and took a bus down to the station.

Noone paid her any attention at the station. When she was finally attended to, after a spending a long time trying to catch someone's attention without wanting to appear rude, a police man with a cup of black coffee asked her if he could offer her any assistance. She told him about the strange appearance of dead body in her freezer about a week ago. The policeman could hardly believe his ears, and in all his long years in the career had never heard anything more insane and bizarre. Feigning a cough to regain his composure, he called for back ups and went down to the woman's house.

Sure enough, the body was still where it was. Next to the lambchop, by the tubs of icecream, untouched. Forensics determined that it had probably been dead for 20 over days. Plus, minus the effects of it being forzen and preserved inside the freezer. The family, which the strange incident revolved around, was as normal as can be. For months and weeks before the dated death of the ex-woman, now a frozen dead object, the family had functioned as it had always functioned. No quarrels, no nothing. Nothing strange what-so-ever. The whole thing was so insanely weird that the police authorities had no idea how to go about the case. They absolutely forbade any leakage of the case into the media, for fear of it being blown out of proportion.

Meanwhile, scores of psychoanalysis tests, personality quizzes have been adminstered to the family, especially to the housewife. To see if any split personality or mental illness would reveal the apparent normality of the family and the strange circumstance it stumbled upon. Whilst she had always been sure of her sanity, being forced to sit through hours of test on end made our housewife a little edgy, and she wondered if she had indeed killed a woman by accident and in a fit of madness hid her in the freezer and forgot all about it. But the identity of the dead woman remained a mystery and refused to yield clues.

Months on from the day the housewife discovered a dead body in her freezer, no headway was made into the case. Police found themselves pressed up against the wall in a dead alley for the search for an explanation which would calm everyone involved's nerves. None was found. Until one day, after being pushed to the edge of exhaustion, the husband innocently asked
"Darling what happened to my sperm and your egg that we were supposed to have donated to the clinic? Is it still left in the freezer?'

Crafted in the deepest mines, with infinite care
searched for like the most luminous pearls at the bottom of oceans
elusive like smoke traped in glazed glass
that we try to shape,
trap
the feelings inside words
and give them forms
to make them dance to tunes of songs
echoing along the corridors of our memories
like ghosts which refuse to move on

I think that's where stories come from
Compressed moments
like the montage of a million photographs
of sensations and sounds
cut up, sewn together, built into immense monuments
of our existence
like our shadow or our reflections
there, as a sign of our being but always beyond
comprehension, beyond a real physical connection
byeond our questions, beyond our imagination

Sometimes our stories leak out of our being
like tears welling up inside our souls
until they burst the dams and become a river
of songs, dance, visions
that we try to capture and make sense of in some understandable forms
like the man I once saw on a train
tattooing his pain on his skin
"苦难忘"
To make that pain definable
so that it can be forgotten or moulded into part of his being
But in process it also became mine

Stories are like that. Like those balloons which make air imaginable
Sometimes a deep well of life-bearing water
a weary traveller in a desert stumbles upon
by accident
immensing himself in a world beyond his own
that all plants and other creatures delve into
partake of
something far older, far greater
than just a single story or a single story teller

Sometimes, it is a monster
spawning out of some empty space in our beings
that nothing can fill
no emotion strong enough to close that gap
that simple happiness sometimes get lost in the fissures
So that everything is taken for granted
the plants budding on my balcony
the insects laying eggs this very instant
Stories make them beautiful, remind us not to forget
But then we always will
so we'll always need new ones
the black hole that engulfs on this end
but spews out something new on the other
An eternal forgetfulness, an eternal search
that process that takes the moment to moment of our lives
build it into a giant glass sclulpture
smash it into a zillion piece
to be rebuilt
again and again
again and again

Passing by "how much?"
very cheap. Nice one. still in good condition. Good buy
"Good bye"? No like that lah. Only 50 cents more what.
We also want to earn mah.
Sweat-drip drip Sticky
Crowds like tropical thunderstorms
sudden arrival, suprising disappearances.
waiting
curious kids wandering, straying
looking for toys
"wait for you change ah"
thank you, look around some more lah!
Malay families looking for good bargains
happy to pay
Chinese women determined to win in
tug of war- haggling
a test of will
standing the hot afternoon sun slanting in
even the shelter can't block out
slow roast of the skin by equator sun
kana Sun burn liao
Digging for change in the purse
sweat like a second skin
dirt
omnipresent
The sun starts its slow progress westward
the heated afternoon of bargaining draws to a slow end
the arrival of breeze accompanies the waning of the crowd
shuffling into aircon hall, slowly heading to the mrt
as vendors desperately cut prices to a steep suicidal fall
packing bags as the last few flies still buzz around for leftovers
As the colours of the afternoon flea market return to that formal abandoned grey
By now, night steadily marches onto the canvas above
The afternoon is already a dream.

They. People. They call themselves that. They think we can't see just because we have no eyes. Think we can't hear because we have no ears, or we can't feel because of our hard exterior. They think a lot of things. Mostly they are wrong. They think they understand the universe. Why the sky is blue. How life began. They think they are the only ones who think.

We see. We feel. We hear. We think. We have been here for a long time now. We wait and listen. We feel and understand so much more. But we keep our secrets. Our world is a different one. I see not with eyes, but with my instincts. An insect lands on a single of my 'leaf' (they call them that. We don't have words. We just are. But we have stories.You can hear us sing sometimes when it rains) I feel it. Know it, know it like something that needs each other. Like an intimate friend, lover, like a stranger who passes one's life and yet leaves a mark. Sometimes a pollen. Sometimes a responsibility like eggs full of life, waiting to come into being, waiting for food, to be able to fly. Waiting for them to come back, to pass by again. Like rain which runs down--every droplet a gem, every droplet a friend, every droplet with a song to exchange with the ground. So that it flows over my surface but will end up inside my veins. But they will leave again changed through our meeting. To fly away. They become clouds. People see clouds, think they are priviledge, that god favours only them. We feel every cloud, We make every cloud. Everything that makes a cloud we have grasped, grasped its shadows, its smoke. We breathed in, drank, exhaled them in a sigh.

Sometimes we dance to the music of the wind. We toss, turn, fly. We move rooted. A child lays her hands on me, and I feel her aura, she feels mine. Her weight on my roots, I know how big she is. People jogging past leave vibrations, drops of their sweats, they pant for breath. I know them too. Friends from a far, I know their news with the wind that brings their scent, tiny leaves, their seed. Sometimes, part of me travels on the wind, ride the rain, fly with the birds afar. But I know those parts of me still. Everything all returns to the earth from which I come. People forget. Forget how things come and go. Where they arise, to where they return. We don't. Time is layered for us, never a line. Time is every ring around my body. Time is the falling and blooming of my being. Time is the coming and going of the seasons. Even now, I feel the vibrations in the air of a piano piece. Vibrations on metal strings which is amplified through one of our bodies. They call 'wood'. They with ears hear only the external sounds, what they call music. But we feel every note. The pain. The bitter, the sweet. The resonating vibrations which echo in things people only see as hollow. Empty. But to us, it is what we know as secrets.