The Road

          Tonight my body is drawn on the asphalt like crime-scene chalk. I inhale the whispers from the greenery rendered victim to the spilled moonlight. A while ago I devoted myself to lying down on this path—a quiet, winding road adjacent to an army camp where I can escape the city’s cries (before that I spent my days  wandering its streets, and concluded the repose this road offered was worth the risk of being near those soldiers). I try standing up. The loose gravel lightly scrapes my forearms as I adjust them, and an especially sharp piece of gravel cuts into my palm as I plant it onto the ground. I think about how tigers have sharp spikes on their tongue meant to strip the skin off their prey; it must hurt to even be licked by one as a show of affection.
          What comes out is oddly translucent.
          I’m stretching out my shirt to clean up the blood when there’s a stir in the bushes. Behind the leaves are a startling pair of yellow eyes, which I call out to. Soon a chubby ginger cat appears, brandishing an expression of curiosity, and as it comes closer I notice a white birthmark on its abdomen. It stops, licks the blood, sniffs my palm, then climbs onto my lap. It faces me and meows, so I sit again and nestle it between my thighs. I perk up as I hear it purr, and feel the warmth beating in its chest.
          Then it speaks: “What’s a teenage girl like you doing here at this time?”
          I panic. Has one of the soldiers in the camp spotted me? I scan the area behind the fence, but I see no one. A pat on my tummy as I widen my search, then two. I look down. It’s looking at me.
          “Tch. I didn’t expect you to be so rude.”
          It is talking to me. I stiffen, and try my best to gather my wits.
          “Sorry. What was your question?”
          It scoffs. “Ah, they’re always like this. I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Missus... no, Miss Sophie.” She points a paw towards the fence. “And that used to be my estate. They demolished it ten years ago to make way for this.”
          “Your estate?” I laugh. “Like you used to hunt there?”
          Her paw smacks my chest. “No! A real, proper estate. A house. A mansion. I was the lady of the house, for God’s sake!”
          She sees my confusion and sighs.
          “I wasn’t always a cat. I was the daughter of a very rich businessman. Papa used to trade antiques or something. I didn’t really care. All I cared about was living in luxury. A day after my twentieth birthday Papa sat me down and told me to get married, or he would cut off my inheritance—”
          “Married at twenty—”
          Her paw smacks my chest again. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking! Anyway, Papa left me no other choice. He was very liberal with how I spent his money, but very strict when it came to matters like these. So I had to court a friend in university. His face was tolerable enough, and he had a milder personality than most. We hit it off, and two years later we were married.”
          I want to comment again but the soreness in my chest says no.
          “We were barely six months in before we had a huge argument about my inheritance. It escalated until my beloved sperm-bank stabbed me in the stomach and dragged my body to this very spot as I bled out. Then he buried me here after finishing the job; the one time he didn’t finish too quickly.” She giggled. “It felt like waking up from a good night’s sleep when I opened my eyes again, and found myself like this.” She rests her furry head on my lap and yawns, as if she had expended a great amount of effort.
          “So you’re saying you got reincarnated as a cat? And that birthmark on your belly... is that where he...?”
          “I don’t know,” she purrs, “it’s definitely close enough. My prevailing theory is that my new body was too perfect, so God had to give it a defect somehow.”
          I roll my eyes.
          “Enough about myself. Et tu?”
          “I really like it here. Where else in this city can you find a place this quiet? I’m free from everyone else prodding at me. And the road—have you ever heard of the phrase ‘The road is like a tiger’s mouth’?”
          My mother had hammered the Chinese saying into me at the age of six, after narrowly pulling me away from a speeding taxi. Most treat it as another witty rhyme to keep naughty children in check. But I’ve come to see it as a way of life. My mother also said women must know how to navigate traffic while men take the wheel—those left standing are either lucky, or have the foresight to avoid fatal collisions. I kept it in mind even as I packed my bag and slipped out of the house for the first and last time. Yet there’s also something liberating about being on the cusp of death, as if I’ve hiked through the entire world and I’m feeling the quiet euphoria one can only imagine at the last step.
          “Only in those insufferable Chinese textbooks,” Miss Sophie says.
          She doesn’t seem interested in an explanation. She adjusts herself on my lap and yawns.
          “You’re weird. We should be friends. Wait for me.”
          Disappearing into the bushes, she returns with a small branch in her mouth. She’s eyeing me expectantly. Not much one can do here for entertainment so we have to make do, she says with her gaze. I’d rather lay down, but I get up anyway and take the branch from her. It feels warm. She meows, signalling me to throw. With a light swing I toss the branch. My eyes struggle to follow the projectile in the darkness (besides the moon, the only other light source is a dimly-lit garage just metres beyond the fence where the soldiers park their SUVs). The branch finally lands on a spot near a bush. Miss Sophie scampers to pick it up, and seconds later the branch is in her mouth again. She looks at me like she wants me to throw the branch again, but pauses and sets it down.
          “This is no fun. You’re holding back,” she raises her head. “Throw it beyond the fence for me, please?”
          “No.” The last thing I want to do is disturb this peace. My peace.
          “It’ll be fun! Look, there’s a hole just big enough for me to squeeze through—”
          “What if they see us?”
          “It’s just me going in. All you have to do is throw. No one’s going to be out there now.
          Besides, even if a soldier sees me I’m just a cat! What’s the worst he can do?”
          “I’d rather not.”
          “Please?”
          “No!”
          “Pretty please?” She exerts her persuasive power by dilating her pupils and cocking her head. I’m barely holding it together. But she comes up to me and strokes my shin with her paw.
          A deep breath. “Just once and that’s it,” I reply.
          “Yippee!” She positions herself at a spot to my right, near the fence. “Ready when you are!”
          I pick up the branch, raising it over my head like a knife. I swing. I let go. Over the fence it goes, striking a pillar, then ricocheting into a decrepit shed next to the garage. It’s as if hell has frozen over. Through the rush in my ears and my gasping heart, I’m sixteen again, standing in a quiet house. There’s a girl surveying the reddish-purple terrain of bruises on her elbows. Through a crack in the door she reminds her mother to have dinner, and leaves with the shivering of unsecured metal in the lock after it slams shut. On the day she ran away, she imagined her mother sending squads of soldiers and policemen to find her, pick her up like a doll, and hurl her back into the house. Nonsensical, but that fear still clamps onto her temples.
          Miss Sophie on the other hand is relatively unbothered. She squishes through the fence with ease and makes for the shed. Halfway there, as Miss Sophie crosses the road, we both hear heavy footsteps. Praying the foliage will conceal me, I duck, peering through the gaps. She stops and her ears perk up. A soldier with messy hair exits the garage, scrambling to the shed. I tell myself to breathe as he opens the door. Miss Sophie is still stunned, unmoving. I beg her to return as a stir arises inside the shed—switches flicked, a door banging on its hinges, shadows leaping between lamps. I whisper to her again. This time she listens, scurrying back towards the fence.
          “Hurry up already! Or I’ll leave you behind!”
          The voice comes from the garage, with one door now open. An exasperated huff dissipates through the openings of the shed. There’s another soldier with rolled-up sleeves leaning on an SUV, waiting for him. The soldier with messy hair dashes out and tells his friend to wait, but the latter starts the engine. I feel the vibrations in my fingertips. Messy-hair, left without a choice, jumps in and the SUV heaves itself forward. The headlights are massive fangs stretching across the camp’s dark belly.
          I am its prey.
          “Hm. For what it’s worth, nothing bad actually happened.”
          Miss Sophie is back beside me, hastily licking herself clean. Her birthmark has been stained brown.
          “Isn’t it disgusting, licking all that?” I ask.
          “I can’t help it. Not letting my body be covered in all that mud and grime. And that air. It reeks of blood and sweat,” she says, restoring the birthmark to its usual shade of white. “I’m sorry. Let’s not do that again.”
          “When do you think they’ll come back? Will they pass by?”
          She suggests that they’re probably going to a nearby store, and I agree. But we also need to keep our guard up; she trains her eyes on the road, her pupils shrinking into black blades. I hug my knees to my chest, counting from one to ten. I force the numbers through my lips like bullets. Miss Sophie, sensing my heart rate, sidles up next to me.
          “I’m so, so sorry. I feel horrible seeing you like this,” she says while gently stroking my thigh. Beyond the blurred edges I realise she’s only a head shorter than myself in foetal position. For some reason I find this amusing, and chuckle.
          “It’s alright. Everything’s alright. I’m sure you’re right, too. Nothing bad’s gonna happen,” I reply.
          In the distance, a humming of an engine. Also beating on the girl’s eardrums are her mother’s guttural shouts as she blames her for making dad leave. The daughter sets down a cup of water with her mother’s dinner and closes the door; before she left she had pressed her ear on that same door and found an equally vicious silence. Headlights soon emerge, those fangs deftly tracing the road like an afterthought. Miss Sophie snaps me out, and we both jump into the bushes. The beast parks itself at the side and stops. The SUV’s matte, olive-green exterior gives it an impression of a negative space amidst the canvas of the forest; devouring all the colour in its way. Messy-hair exits first, immediately running for a nearby spot in the bushes. Sleeves steps out, leans against the hood, and produces a packet of cigarettes. He laughs as Messy-hair fidgets about, obscured by the thick, leafy mass.
          “Fucking hell. Didn’t you just go earlier?” He has a gravelly voice. It’s soft. There’s a flickering of smoke and vowels as he speaks, the nicotine sticking needles in my nostrils.
          “I was going to!” A high-pitched nasalisation rings out, “but some cheebye decided to stick a branch into the only fucking toilet bowl!”
          Sleeves howls with laughter, as if he has no other care in the world.
          “You can’t be serious. You didn’t try to take it out?”
          “Of course I did! I was close. But you were rushing me so I had to leave.”
          He calms down. “Whatever. You can smoke here, right?”
          “Oi. I was going to bring us somewhere with a better view, you know.”
          “Ya, sorry.”
          “You owe me. You’re lucky I always bring tissues with me. And you’re the one who got us into this mess in the first place. We got banned from smoking because—”
          “—I talked back to the sergeant. I know. I won’t take long. Just wait for me.”
          Sleeves takes another drag from his cigarette as he waits, surveying the forest. “It’s as if they become less... desirable... with each generation,” Miss Sophie whispers, “if my husband had looked anything like that, I would have done the stabbing instead.” She turns to me. “I assume relationships are a sensitive topic for you?”
          I don’t respond. Static builds up in my feet. I stare at the SUV, picturing myself being crushed. The sensation feels familiar, and provides a strange comfort. I wonder where the tires will leave tar marks on my limbs, which parts will look like deflated balloons, and whether I will even feel the forces where they’re strongest. The front tire, like a small ant, scales my groin and my belly and my chest and my neck and with my last breath I tell the asphalt to take me.
          “Bro, can you pass me the shovel? I need to clean up.”
          Sleeves tosses away his cigarette and searches inside the SUV. He walks off after retrieving a shovel. “See,” Miss Sophie says, climbing onto my shoulder, “they’ll be gone soon.” There’s soil being transferred from one spot to another. My heart pumps as if freshly resuscitated, and I feel her snug fur against my cheek. Her whiskers brush against me like unspooled silk. I try to regulate my breathing.
          “Don’t waste time.”
          “Wait, wait. I’m trying. The soil’s not very soft.”
          “Just hurry up.”
          “Yah, yah, I know... what’s this?”
          A commotion. Digging faster and faster and faster. Curses hurled at the heavens like boulders. A yelp loud enough to shake the trees at their roots. I look at Miss Sophie, expecting reassurance. She’s confused too. “Wait here,” she says, as she drops down and creeps towards them. She appears to recognise something, and motions for me to follow. I shake my head. She gives me a smile, nods, and beckons to me again. I take a deep breath and follow, cutting just enough distance between us and the soldiers to barely see their discovery—a body, wrapped in cellophane. I squint my eyes. Its core features remain intact, the rest evidently having been ravaged by time and nature; above the neck a youthful, beautiful face with which a portrait could have spawned an entire renaissance, while the choir of onyx locks adorning the scalp had been unmistakably fuller in their prime. One may even suggest that the unnaturally pale skin was only a shade redder when it walked the world of the living.
          “Not too shabby, I hope?” she asks, observing my expression. “How nice of him to wrap it up.”
          I don’t get to reply. This time the girl is undressing her mother, peeling a shirt off her back like an old bandage. Under the film of sweat it’s pale, almost like the corpse. The mother breaks the silence first, turning off the running water so her daughter can hear. She asks if she remembers what she was told about the road. About tigers’ mouths and traffic and men and women. The softness of her mother’s voice is surprising, as if one reversed the process on a cotton ball pulled taut. She says her daughter has bigger things to worry about, and she’s sorry for being dead weight. The daughter replies it’s okay, because she’s not standing in the middle of the road like an idiot. One day she’ll get to drive, and she’ll decide how she dies; she will die when she wants to die.
          The soldiers are screaming. Miss Sophie notices I’m not moving a muscle.
          “Though of course as things stand, you’re the prettier one. You know I don’t say this lightly,” she beams. Crusty, blackened blood has sprouted from the body’s abdomen like a fungus.
          “Did they ever catch your husband?” I ask, finally forming a thought.
          “I don’t know,” she replies. “Judging by the state of things, I’m  assuming not.”
          “What about a proper burial?”
          “I haven’t really thought about it. Things aren’t so bad now, honestly. Other than the fact he’s probably running free. What good is all that beauty locked in a coffin or burnt to ash? At the very least I get to show myself to you.” Miss Sophie sits, resting on her hind legs.
          The soldiers have regained some of themselves. Sleeves is muttering into a walkie-talkie. Messy-hair adjusts the shovel in his hands, swivelling the handle in his palms like a baseball bat. He raises the shovel, pointing its tip towards the corpse. Miss Sophie’s ears perk up. He pokes the corpse with the shovel.
          “What the hell does he think he’s doing?”
          Miss Sophie instinctively bares her fangs and charges towards him. The two are caught unaware as she launches herself towards Messy-hair’s hand, chomping onto his fingers with a decade’s worth of spite. The veins on his neck expand as he yells out in pain; immediately he tries to shake her off him, flailing his bitten arm around as hard as he can. But Miss Sophie’s jaws are like a beggar grasping onto their last morsel of dignity. She refuses to let go. Sleeves finally reacts, attempting to pull her away. With a rough tug he manages to fling her off—she lands on the mud with a heavy squelch.
          Adrenaline buzzes in my body like heavy rain. Yet I stand there like an idiot, unmoving as they yell and spit on her helpless frame. She’s out cold, laying down on one side, half her face caked in mud. Sleeves exhales deeply and tells his buddy to get in the SUV. Messy-hair is clutching his right hand. Before he leaves he turns to Miss Sophie one last time, raises his foot, and kicks her in the belly. She doesn’t react. They’re walking in my direction. I lock my arms to my chest, try my best to keep my legs from shaking, and struggle to put on the toughest expression I can muster. Filling up my diaphragm, I desperately search for the best words to use. 
          They emerge from the bushes. I’m definitely in their field of vision now. Sleeves is even looking at me, his eyes fixed on my face. I open my mouth, though it feels involuntary. No sound is produced. My fists open and close as they approach, as if I will hit back at them. As if I will do anything at all. They don’t react even when they’re steps away from my frail frame. Not
a sliver of motion in their pupils. 
          I realise that they’re not staring at me, but through me. They walk past noiselessly, heaving themselves into the SUV. With quivering hands I run to the front hood—my arms waving like a desperate stowaway—still they refuse to react. Anger and frustration eventually overcome my incredulity, so with a newfound strength I slam my palms against the hood. A shockwave swims across the metal. They’re spooked for a while, but Sleeves says something to Messy-hair, and the latter slaps the dashboard. Sleeves turns the key in the ignition. The beast wakes up, its charged roar threatening to conquer the forest. I stay put. Surely they won’t? The engine continues to hum, increasing in volume. Only at the last second do I dodge as the vehicle revs up, speeding off into a tunnel of sleeping trees.
          As the light dissolves I find the girl again. She doesn't know where to go. In front of her is a busy road. The straps of her backpack have begun clawing into her back and shoulders. A puddle catches her reflection and she sees a face she’s afraid of—a haphazard arrangement of glass shards formed from her parents smashing a window. Tracing her fingers over its features is a futile exercise in recognition. From the puddle it looks like two disfigured hands trying to pull apart the skin. A line of cars drive past, and she looks away towards the sun, as water splashes onto her shirt.
          Some mud had clotted on Miss Sophie’ body. She opens her eyes when I begin wiping it off. There’s boot polish on her birthmark. As soon as she regains consciousness she begins squirming in pain.
          I tell her they’re gone, and that I’ll take care of her. She mumbles while fighting through the pain, “I saw it. Before I passed out. They ignored you.”
          “I’m sorry,” I force out, “I should have done better. Should have tried harder to protect you.”
          She shakes her head, ignoring my previous statement. Her face shifts to a ruminative expression. “I did suspect it at first, but this confirms it.”
          “Confirms what?”
          She looks away. I’m sure the revelation is rolling around her tongue like a grenade. Suddenly we’re caught in a strong breeze. The powerful gust assaults our eyelids, and I fight to keep mine slightly open. Her silhouette melts into the ink-black forest.
          “You’re just like me. You’re already dead.”
          My mind shrivels into meaningless noise. She taps me on the foot. Again that busy road, the sun now obscured by clouds. Hot rubber beneath my feet. Another tap. I’m looking into my bathroom mirror and the bright bodies of cars flit past like flies. Their engines are screaming at me. A more desperate tap. The point of impact is the centre of the torso, right where the ribs frown. While mid-air I observe the SUV’s make; the silver emblem grafted on its chassis like a bayonet. There is a spark of hesitation in the green beast, but its priority is rinsing away the blood as it speeds off. By then the puddle is gone, my face splashed all over my shirt. 
          “Were they the culprits?” Miss Sophie reads my mind. 
          The truth is I don’t know, but I’m interrupted before I can answer. All at once, loud noises blare from all corners of the camp as flood lights switch on. I carry her and set her down on the side of the road, where the asphalt is still warm. Then I go back and lay in the mud, right next to where they left the body. As my back osmosises into the cold sludge I see lights as bright as the judgement of heaven, so magnificent in size each of them look like the hands of God. I close my eyes because it stings. The thumps of polished boots are a plague infecting the camp. 
          Meanwhile I’m blooming like a chrysanthemum, as I rest my head against the soft chest of Miss Sophie’s former body. Despite everything I’m relieved my body can finally rest. Perhaps it’s buried somewhere around this camp, tied up in a trash bag cheaper than unwanted offal but at least it’s quiet. I’m sticking my fingers into the mud, contracting them, feeling the soil push back. It’s supposed to be cold, but it soothes my skin like warm milk. An infinite warmth expands within my nerves, comparable to the splitting of an atom. I don’t need to open my eyes. Miss Sophie scurries over and leaps in, snuggling up to me. This time she doesn’t mind the filth. Blood trickling from her birthmark marbles the mud.
          “If you ever need help searching for your body—”
          “Just let me rest for a while,” I reply.
          But I can’t fall asleep. This time the vibrations can be felt even within my heart valves. She feels it too as her whiskers tremble with each bass beat. I pray our bodies have found peace. I hold her head against my chest while the envoy approaches, their headlights swallowing the gentle, timid night.

At the time of writing, Jovan is currently awaiting an undergraduate course in English Literature at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is a member of the local playwriting collective, Playwrights Commune, and a writer experimenting with drama, prose, and poetry.