Web Exclusives - Fiction

Sindhu Rajasekaran | Fiction

 

And I never thought this day would come, but here I am, sitting in front of the ritual fire, repeating Sanskrit mantras I don’t understand. He’s looking at me now, and I can feel it on my skin. We are getting married. Damini is locked away somewhere in a room, Lakshmi’s at Lord Krishna’s feet in the heavens, and I’m going to be his wife...

Yusi Avianto Pareanom | Fiction

 

Anwar Sadat died on the very day he arrived in Jakarta from Semarang. He was twenty-eight. Naming his son Anwar, after Egyptian President Muhammad Anwar El Sadat, his father had his reasons for choosing that name and not Gamal Abdul Nasser or Husni Mubarak. A week before the birth of Anwar from Semarang, Sadat the president had been assassinated by one of his own soldiers. According to the news reports, the death could have been avoided if Anwar Sadat had agreed to wear a bulletproof vest, as recommended by his advisors. He refused, saying that bulletproof vests were for pussies. 

Yetti A. KA | Fiction

 

I felt embarrassed. Never in my whole life had anyone asked me my name. People just called me Lus’ Sister. And I would understand that it was me they were referring to, even though I had my own name, which seemed foreign to me because nobody ever called me by it. And so, when the pretty woman asked me my name, well, to be honest, I was a bit shy about telling her. 

Sunlie Thomas Alexander | Fiction

 

Usually the birds would come to perch and sing in large shady trees or on the roofs of homes with infants who were still breastfeeding, or mothers in late pregnancy. When the target baby cried, that was when the birds would snatch the unfortunate child’s aura and fly off with it far away, soaring high into the grey supernatural heavens. The baby would immediately sicken, its body slowly turning blue and eventually dying.

Nukila Amal | Fiction

 

Let’s go out to sea, my child. It is time. I sense them coming closer. I can hear faint echoes of voices drifting in the dawn wind. Listen: this early morn, the wind comes not softly in rustles, but hissing and slashing along the road. It is screeching through the aching joints of the windowpane, whistling through the cracks of the squeaking door, rushing chill, enclosing the house in cold. The candle stirs as if scratched: blazing awhile, blinking awhile. Harsh dark is forcing its way in through every hole. 

Avianti Arman | Fiction

 

The sky is red. A naga swoops down, sweeping the stars and the sun. Sparks illuminate the tips of its wings. Fire spreads. Wind swirls. Fear shoots into the air like octopus’ ink. Armour-clad warriors lie sprawled on the ground. Screams of desperation fill the air. The creature is incensed. Houses, trees, distant mountaintops: everything disintegrates into unrecog­nisable rubble. Razed to the ground. Everything. Except for one child standing upright, motionless. He holds a tautly strung bow in his hand. His face is as dark as stone, but his eyes are as bright as lightning. It is from his bow that a great arrow was shot and has penetrated the naga’s chest.

Gus tf Sakai | Fiction

 

This is my biggest chance. The words seemed to make every cell in Dani’s brain seize up. Trembling all over, he followed the shopkeeper upstairs. The stairs were of solid boards, old ones which made an odd squeaking sound when stepped on. On the top floor in the gloom he was greeted by the sight of a doorway into an ancient burial cave, the staring eyes of tau-tau effigies looking like they were soaring upwards towards death...

Cok Sawitri | Fiction

 

In the end, my friend reported, she was taken back to her house and dropped off as if nothing had happened. Since that time, she has been living normally, with no outward sign to mark that strange occurrence. The only telling sign is a look in her eyes which, when we exchange glances, makes me feel as if I am being drawn into a whirlwind.

Ben Sohib | Fiction

 

At first, of course, there hadn’t been any plan to cheat anyone. That idea came spontaneously. That afternoon, Hisam, along with over a hundred others, had accompanied the remains of Salim Gurame, a villager who had died the previous night, to the Kober cemetery. Hisam had actually not been keen on going along to the cemetery. After paying his respects at the funeral home and saying a prayer over the body at the Nurul Huda Mosque, he had intended to go straight home. He wanted to shut himself away there for the whole day. He craved an extended period of time without human contact. It was only the uncomfortable thought of the neighbours’ comments that persuaded him to join in the funeral procession. 

 
Read more...
Azhari Aiyub | Fiction

 

At that time, the ship that brought me from Lamuri had just docked. From the Malabar harbour I was to continue my journey to Istanbul by land. My father, the harbourmaster of Lamuri, doubted his sixteen-year-old child could proceed with the journey alone. A colleague of his, Hamzah by name, would be waiting for me at the harbour and would guide me until I was ensured a safe arrival at the gate of the School of Navigation in Istanbul...

Lily Yulianti Farid | Fiction

 

That was approximately the start of the story Zara intended to write for Fayza, one that might take the form of a novel – or perhaps even a trilogy – requiring many years for her to complete. 

Abidah El Khalieqy | Fiction

 

When my mother died, her face changed. I was the first to notice. When other family members and friends came to pay their respects, what I saw in their eyes was doubt; none could believe that the deceased was my mother. Even my brother, who hadn’t seen my mother alive for three years, as soon as he saw the corpse, straightaway announced that the deceased was our aunt, the youngest girl in my mother’s family. The doctors and nurses who had cared for Mother when she was in the hospital were also surprised; no one could believe their eyes. 

 
Read more...
Erika Banerji | Fiction

 

It was darker now and pouring with rain, and the first heads of her black tulips bent as if in mourning. Her mother had warned her against planting tulips. They were weak and unaccustomed to wet weather. After her mother died Edith made sure she filled her borders with tulip bulbs.

 
Read more...
Shilpi Suneja | Fiction

 

Aunty Sumana’s Flushing seethed with thieves. The stores along Union Street robbed her blind on calling cards, the ladies outside Macy’s nearly filched her purse while trying to sell her a worse-looking one. The chicken-over-rice guys diddled her out of fair portions. Men lurked in the shadows, ready to murder her in cold blood and run away with her cane. Flushing mirrored Gotham City before Batman, Bombay in the days of Varadarajan, the Tamil gangster. The upshot was that Meera had resigned to fetching her aunt from the subway station.

 
Read more...
Zach MacDonald | Fiction

 

This story has a happy ending, but first Ye-lim must crawl on her belly through a swamp of icy mud. The mud is viscous and sucking, calling her to join the grave of those who came to this place before her. There are bones: a femur here, shards of what may be skull there. Human or animal, she can’t tell about the skull shards. She finds a tooth, its enamel yellowed like an old corn kernel, embedded in the muck that squelches between her raw fingers. It reminds her of the teeth on the man – a soldier – who shattered her father’s body.

 
Read more...
Xu Xi | Fiction

 

Chan Lai-tai tugged at her skirt belt as she readied herself for work. No way to cinch it tighter. Should losing only five pounds make such a difference?

Xiong would repay her today. He had brought it up this morning, the only thing he said after kissing her, just before dashing out to catch the early train to Guangzhou. Never time to make love when he was in a hurry. Did he remember his keys? He’d left a set in Guangzhou last trip, and she’d had to scramble to make him a new one. So forgetful! But that wasn’t important because something else nagged. What?

 
Read more...
Nicolas Gattig | Fiction

 

It was important that the prostitute be foreign, ideally newly arrived, not conversant in Japanese. Shimoyama wished to keep talk to a minimum. Furthermore, a foreigner would have more of an enterprising nature – or perhaps, as he was coldly aware, be economically deprived of choice – to agree to the service he desired.

 
Read more...
Murzban F. Shroff | Fiction

 

It was a wonder how the bird got in, considering that the shaft was covered with a special bird mesh. It could be inferred that the pigeon had been looking for a safe place to lay her eggs and, in her quest for childbearing privacy, had torn through the mesh. 

The bird was noisy. It cooed without pause, its cooing growing louder with every passing minute.

 
Read more...
Kunwar Narain | Fiction

 

Even when the stand was kicked out from under it, the marionette remained in place – with its hands and feet thrown up in mid-air. At the sight of this miracle, you’d expect that the onlookers would have jumped back in amazement. But aside from a few children and childlike adults, the crowd showed only polite appreciation and continued on their way. It must have been utterly devastating to the boy running the puppet show. For when people don’t even take a passing interest in the greatest of miracles, what is the poor miracle maker to do?

 
Read more...
Kamana Srikanth | Fiction

 

I was born at a strange hour. It was a Friday night. All was quiet in the village of Mihalpur and, I believe, within the small one-room hut, too. The threadbare curtains must have been closed. I am told that my mother never held me, and I suspect that she never looked into my face. A girl child. I can see her now, dark like me, her long hair matted with the sweat of labour, curled up in a corner on a hard, bare cot as tears leak down the sides of her face, limp with exhaustion and misery. That particular sequence of events is not such a mystery to me. I saw it happen many times, with other women. I was the silent witness.

 
Read more...
Bernice Chauly | Fiction

 

Kuala Lumpur. KL. Kala Lumpa or Kala Lampur to the white man, the Mat Sallehs. City of sinners and sex. Sodom and Gomorrah. It was 1998, and the city was the ‘party central’ of Asia. Of the world. Drugs had opened up the minds of this one-time placid society and bayed in a new revolution, in a time when people hungered for freedom from authoritarian politicians, from the police, from their mindless jobs, from themselves.

 
Read more...
Jung Young Moon | Fiction

 

I was in a top-floor unit of a fifteen-storey apartment building with a view of nothing but identical apartment buildings, sitting on a living-room sofa with a Maltese puppy on my lap, folding and unfolding its left ear repeatedly, the dog gazing up at me expressionlessly as I gazed back at it. Before being on my lap, the dog had been lying on its stomach on the living room floor. The dog had not ended up on my lap of its own volition, because it was still too young to get up on the sofa without someone’s help. From the sofa, I had half-heartedly picked up the dog and placed it on my lap, gazed down at it for a moment and, as if I had suddenly thought of origami, I had begun folding and unfolding its ear, like I was doing origami.

 
Read more...
Twan Eng Tan | Fiction

 

IT WAS RAINING on the morning I was scheduled to die, a deluge that had begun in the late watches of the night. I had not slept, having spent the night thinking of the last time I had seen my father, six months before. I heard the rain riding in on the winds of the South China Sea, the sheaves of water thrashing across the rutted runway, hitting the rattan walls and the thatched roofs of the pilots' billets, so different from the gentle summer rains of my homeland.

 
Read more...
Wendy Law-Yone | Fiction

 

Americans, I have noticed, are fools for homelands – especially the homelands of others. To determine a person’s provenance is as important to them as it is to the Chinese to determine a person’s worth. And to Americans like Will, who have escaped their own homelands, proudly calling themselves ‘expats’, it seems even more important to repatriate everyone else.

 
Read more...
Letyar Tun | Fiction

 

The ceiling fans whirred a slow rhythm. Mould crept into the corners of the whitewashed walls; the wide windows looked out onto the barren prison yard. Nyo Maung was marched up to a low, wooden dock flanked by two long tables. His feet scraping across the broken floor tiles echoed angrily through the colonial hall. Before the Burma Socialist Programme Party emblem sat three court martial judges – two majors and a colonel – neat and robotic in their crisp green uniforms, with pomaded hair, wire-rimmed glasses and gold stars on their shoulders. Nyo Maung knew obedience had raised them in the ranks to where they could sentence any soldier to death.

 
Read more...
Shion Miura | Fiction

 

‘You’re going to be busy next year,’ declared old lady Soneda. It was a fine evening in late December. They were in the hospital lounge, which was very quiet. Outside the windows, a threadbare lawn and withered trees with naked branches could be seen.

 
Read more...
Yijun Luo | Fiction

 

Now I’m going to tell you a story about women and love, said Tunick. Or rather, it’s a story about the dark side of love: fickleness, jealousy, and fury. You shall witness many evil deeds committed in the name of love. It’s a story that unleashes your most perverted fantasies, in which you torture your ex-lovers out of guilt and feigned anger, ruin them with rumours, kill them with a borrowed knife, wipe out every single relative of your love-rivals, fornicate with your neighbour’s wife and daughter, kill your best pal and screw his voluptuous wife.

 
Read more...
Cho Haejin | Fiction

 

The sound of dogs barking woke him up. Ahn reached out reflexively for his phone, which he had placed at the head of his bed. It felt familiar and solid in his hand, but his ears were still mistaking his ringtone for the barking of dogs.

Coincidentally, he had been dreaming that he was being chased by a pack of black dogs and had just ducked into a phone booth with broken glass. The barking dogs were slavering at the mouth, sharp teeth bared. Ahn clutched the phone with trembling hands as his knees nearly buckled from a sharp urge to urinate.

Hello? Is s-somebody there? Ahn sputtered, when the signal finally went through. The dogs vanished as suddenly as if they’d been swallowed by a thick fog. Not just the dogs, but the streetlights, the vandalised phone booth, and the handset he had been clutching, leaving Ahn standing alone in a deserted field.

 
Read more...
O Thiam Chin | Fiction

 

‘Please get ready. Number 36.’

We move into position, me behind Wee Kiong. He bends low, legs apart. The sensors on us light up and begin clicking. Those embedded in us – the permanent ones – start ticking, the wiggle of worm-crawl under our skins. It is not an unpleasant sensation; in fact, it is mildly sensual.

I prepare myself, using the lube. The air-con in the room dries it up quickly. I apply a dollop on Wee Kiong. His muscles clench, then relax.

 
Read more...
Kamana Srikanth | Fiction

 

We float and swim, we boat and punt on the storm waters aglow in the weak sunlight. In a freak occurrence, an accident of the El Niño year, warm and cold currents met and mingled, a dance of opposites that birthed the rains in gleaming rivers. If there is a line that separates land from warm turquoise, it blurs, and we fall into our shadows or perhaps our shadows swallow us, the outlines of boat and people, wavy lines of form.

 
Read more...
Flora Qian | Fiction

 

Everyone was talking about the bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade. Yun and her classmates had seen angry commentators dominating the news every day since the event had occurred, a month before, in May 1999.

 
Read more...
Shagufta Sharmeen | Fiction

 

I can hear crickets, luminous crickets singing inside my veins, singing and telling stories of sun-baked earth and marshlands and bogs, crickets merrily taking those stories into my pumping heart...

 

Lee Kiho | Fiction

 

Listen. Here’s a story from the era of General Chun Doo-hwan – one of the more preposterous dictators to have ruled our land.

Thirty-odd years have passed since these events transpired. Yet as the fate of our protagonist-hero demonstrably shows, sometimes it makes no dif­ference at all that whole decades have gone by. Today he’s still a wanted man, just as he was then... 

Sebastian Sim | Fiction

 

There were three things Gimme Lao did not know about himself.

The first occurred at his point of birth. The second happened way before he was born. And the third repeated itself many times over his life. Strictly speaking, the third was not about him. It was about the pivotal impact he had on other people, which he never found out about.

Take, for example, Yik Fan. Gimme Lao and Yik Fan went to the same primary school. Being two years apart, they were not in the same class, nor did they end up in the same extracurricular sports team. As far as he was concerned, Gimme Lao never knew Yik Fan existed.

Yik Fan, on the other hand, would never forget Gimme Lao. More...

 

Myeong-kwan Cheon | Fiction

 

This is not a story about Li Xiaolong, also known as Bruce Lee. And I'm not saying that my uncle is Bruce Lee. My uncle was simply one of the countless ordinary people who admired Bruce Lee. At that time, we were all fans of Li Xiaolong. Was there ever a boy who hadn't hit himself on the back of the head while having a go with those nunchucks? We wanted to have a fist as fast and powerful as his, and back muscles as broad as a straw floor-mat...

 

RK Biswas | Fiction

 

The tiger lay sprawled upon a stone girdle that ran around the pipal tree’s trunk. He was a picture of elegance in his fashionably striped suit. His furry little member peeping out from between his thighs and the soft curve of his belly gave him just that little touch of helplessness, so attractive in all things male...

 

Cheng Yong | Fiction

 

Li Mingqin would lean on his balcony railing and smoke a cigarette before going back to bed with a good book. He had lately been skimming through The Story of the Stone, and, although he wasn’t terribly interested in the teenagers or their whims, he was fascinated by the descriptions of the house interiors, and had practically off by heart the passage where Lin Daiyu arrives at the Rong-Guo Mansion...

Eliza Vitri Handayani | Fiction

 

This time she burst into his world with her half-page profile in a Sunday newspaper in a section dedicated to emerging artists...

Glenn Diaz | Fiction

 

Glenn Diaz's 'Stress Management' takes us behind the scenes in a Philippines call centre for a grimly humorous account of a soul-sapping industry. 

 

Read more...

Michael Vatikiotis | Fiction

 

Dr Ren had never seen the real thing before. He’d read about it, of course. He’d seen pictures. He knew the penalties, like everyone else...

Justin Hill | Fiction

 

Then the cool north wind blew. Meili stood on the top of Victoria Peak and looked across the bay to the distant mountains behind Kowloon. She imagined she could smell Hunan again...

Jeremy Tiang | Fiction

 

When Doctor’s words confound Sophia’s patchy Mandarin, she says, Pardon, but he just grows unhelpfully louder. Finally she begs, Wait, wait, and dials a number. As the phone rings, she imagines the aunt’s ungainly progress through the apartment’s camphor-scented air, catching her knee on the rosewood armchair, swearing in pungent bursts.

A click and muffled thud as the aunt pulls at the cord and demands, breathlessly, Yes?

 

 More...

Suzanne Kamata | Fiction

 

ON THE FIRST DAY of spring Keita Hosokawa fell in love with a bird. If anyone had told him a week before that that would happen, he wouldn’t have believed it. He was fed up with birds. Specifically crows. More...

Kyung-sook Shin | Fiction

 

By the time I was in my thirties, I was fated to die, said the murderer, now in his forties. He spoke again. Murder is my profession. My side-job is to pose as a policeman, then extort from people. I murder only if it pleases me.

Phoebe Tsang | Fiction

 

For three years, Tulene has had the bathroom to himself. Still, he keeps a milk crate stocked with the essentials just inside his front door, for easy access. If Old Chow were to find Tulene’s toothpaste beside the bathroom sink, or his towel hung on the bent nail poking from the back of the door, he might demand more rent...

Dipika Mukherjee | Fiction

 

Tea splashed from the cup half-raised to her lips, smudging the newsprint. Sheena couldn’t believe it but there it was, a half-page matrimonial advertisement with the title: Indian Billionaire Needs A Wife: Are you the ONE I am looking for?

more...

Phillip Kim | Fiction

 

Jason Donahue liked foie gras well enough. For Howard Leitner, however, it seemed divine. The unctuous concoction was set inside individual Chinese soup spoons, allowing it to slide directly onto the middle of the palate before compliantly dissolving on the tongue. Leitner took in his serving much as someone else might take a shot of bourbon – with one swift motion. Before swallowing, he reached for his glass of 1988 Suduiraut and took a sip of the goldenrod liquid. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he let out an audible moan...
 
Anis Shivani | Fiction

 

The strongest man on the job fell and hurt his back, and ended up in hospital for weeks, abandoning a lovely young wife to temptation and scandal. Things were never the same for Hafiz, the innocent bystander – not at the godown, not anywhere else.

Ann Tashi Slater | Fiction

 

The sun burns through the mist, vultures circling and then settling in the dead trees. The golden roofs of a monastery rise like a mirage against the snow-flocked Dharamsala mountains...

 

more...

Amanda Lee Koe | Fiction

 

Amanda Lee Koe presents the subtle and moving story of Arlene and Nelly, from Ministry of Moral Panic, winner of the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize (English Fiction).

'It wasn’t always this good, and Arlene never lets herself forget that. This is why she hasn’t gone to the doctor’s yet, despite the burgeoning lump in between the end of her armpit and the beginning of her breast, on her left side.'

     More.....

Melody Kemp | Fiction

 

Miss Noy Khouvangsa was Lao’s first cyborgweaver.

She was made of silk. Her body tissues, corneas, and hair were constructed from the exudate of the remarkably industrious silk worm...

Melody Kemp | Fiction

 

The air turned chilly as the sun sighed into the nearby hills. It picked up the smells of dust, mixed with metallic and acrid dung flavours.

Ms Phaeng watched, holding her breath as the last sliver of red fell out of sight.  Casting a quick mantra to the spirits of nature, she swallowed a glass of lao lao to start the evening...

GB Prabhat | Fiction

 

The moment he returned from the office, Ananth quarrelled with his wife.

Sheela had reserved a table for eight o’clock that evening and it was already seven. Ananth could tell that she had been pacing the corridor....

Bashir Sakhawarz | Fiction

 

When a bomb lands in Talwar Khan's Afghan village and fails to explode, his rival attempts to deal with it.

 
... more >
Jia Mai | Fiction

 

A little earlier that afternoon, Commander Zhang’s car had driven up to the guest house, turned around a couple of times and headed, not for the west wing, but for the east one. It stopped, and the Commander came bustling round to open the rear door and obsequiously bow someone out...

F. H. Batacan | Fiction

 

Some days I just can’t seem to focus. It’s hard to concentrate on what’s going on around me, on what I’m doing.

It’s been getting worse lately. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed from the moment I wake up in the morning, as though something bad is going to happen.

I can’t breathe right; my hands and feet are cold. My head hurts...

Wei-Jan Chi | Fiction

 

After I left my teaching job I faded out of my marriage, which really existed in name only, and sold the flat in Xindian. I distanced myself from the theatre circle where I’d made a sort of name for myself and began refusing invitations to drink and play mahjong with the lecherous pigs I had come to call my friends. Once packed, my meagre belongings were barely enough to fill a small van, and so I passed through the gloomy Xinhai tunnel to set up shop as a private investigator in Wulong Street, a godforsaken place of unmarked graves...

Prosper Anyalechi | Fiction

 

 

In Roppongi we have saints. Self-proclaimed street prophets – insanity (pardon me, I mean fervour) was how my people survived the mission-aries. I tolerate all claims of divine sight, lest I dig the moat I drown in. What I see: blinding lights, plainclothes police. People don’t come here for God. People come here to find people. Look, don’t touch. Touch, don’t hold. Hold, but put it back when you’re done, please. Roppongi ni irassha...

 

Tew Bunnag | Fiction

 

The first drops that hit the corrugated iron roof sounded like fat, lazy splashes, but soon they were pelting down as furious as bullets. Phra Sumon sat cross-legged on the floor of the little hut with eyes closed – a picture of monastic stillness that contrasted with the watery onslaught. But his mind was far from still, and the beads of sweat forming on his forehead slid down the contours of his angular features and dropped from his chin onto the orange robe that cloaked his brown, athletic body. In the insistent beat of the downpour he kept hearing a mantra that dragged him back, yet again, into the wreckage of his past...

Krishan Partap Singh | Fiction

The tale that follows is neither a personal confession nor an apology – for which it could very easily be mistaken – but something much more substantial. It is an explanation or, to be more precise, an elucidation of the excesses, committed, within my knowledge, by men of power.

 
Read more...