Michele Lim
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
Yuxian first found the moss on the back of her bed post. She had been trying to move her bed from one end of her room to the other, thinking that a change of scenery, however small, might do something for her mental health. But all she gained from trying was a pair of sore arms and deep imprints on her palms where she had gripped the hard wooden edges of her bed—the room, which Yuxian had lived in for more than twenty years, turned out to be too small and oddly shaped to accommodate any other configuration. The bed could only be inched forward and rotated so far before its edges clashed against the opposite wall. Leaving there, Yuxian stepped into the empty space that had once been occupied by her bed. The floor beneath it was cool and felt almost damp, being covered in a thin layer of dust. Then Yuxian saw it.
This bed, which Yuxian had also laid in for more than twenty years, was peeling from behind. The bed post had always been against the wall, and now that the thin fabric that concealed the wooden frame was flaking away, Yuxian could see that the frame had been overrun by something dark and patchy. A small part of her reminded her that back when she was normal, a sight like that would have sent her screaming immediately. But it had been a long time since she was normal. So Yuxian reached out and touched the black thing.
The moss was soft but firm. She dug her finger into it in a peeling motion, but it did not give way. Its surface was cool but not wet, and when Yuxian rubbed her index finger against her thumb, her skin remained dry. Suddenly she was tired. Since the moss didn’t seem to be doing anybody any harm, she decided to leave it be. She pushed her bed back into place.
In her room, there was a clock running that only Yuxian could hear. Each tick brought Yuxian closer to the time when she would finally, eventually, have to tell her parents that she was in fact not on leave, but she had been let go. She had tried to imagine their reactions—anything from shock to anger to shame—but since a few years ago, she had had difficulty imagining their faces. It was not because they hadn’t seen each other in years; Yuxian had always lived with her parents. She saw them every day. When she was younger, and normal, they had talked more often. When she got admitted into the local university, they told her how proud they were that she would be the first among them to graduate. This was the last time that she could see their faces clearly in her mind’s eye. Since then, everything began to blur; as though her foot had slipped and caught an undertow, and whenever she tried to find the surface of any memory, it rippled away.
She had always lived in this room. The sun did not shine directly into it. Something about the way the adjacent and opposite flats were arranged made her room constantly dim and airless. She had two electric fans and two lamps, and when she was flying into a silent panic over being close to failing a university class, or googling ways to avoid a stalker, or working desperately through the night for a job that she knew she was going to lose anyway, the electric hum of all the machinery combined—the same sound she had heard every day for more than twenty years had reminded her that she could still maintain the illusion of normality, even if she felt that she was now two selves: the one floating and the one sinking.
After finding the moss, Yuxian found it difficult to leave her bed. While her parents were out at work during the day, she would sit upright, watching shadows cut themselves against the blocks of flats outside. Several days passed this way, with Yuxian only getting up to greet her parents when she came home, before retreating again, shutting the door behind her. On the fifth day, she rose to find that her shadow had imprinted itself against the wall.
There was, in fact, more than one shadow. Imprints of her body stretched against the wall, some yawning, some laughing, some weeping. They moved from west to east, then disappeared back into her bed post. Yuxian switched on all the lights, and when that didn’t seem like enough, she pulled the curtains off their hooks, sweeping them under the bed. Now the moss seemed to glisten, each small, bumpy surface catching the light like a tiny star. The sight was grotesque and beautiful and too much, so Yuxian simply lay back down on her bed, with the imprints of herself arranged above her like so many dark angels, and waited to be found.
Michele Lim is a fiction writer from Singapore. She writes about fractures, healing, and the strangeness of postcolonial and/or diasporic experience. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Prose) from the University of East Anglia, and has had her fiction published by Ethos Books, Symbal, and The Sprawl Mag.