Introducing New Village 3, featuring a front cover by Andrew T. Crum and a special back cover by Wo Swee Teck.

Also:

• A short story by Tan Ray Tat.
• Essays by Alex Lee and Goh Lee Kwang.
• Poetry by Catalina Rembuyan and Kuning Pening.
• A comic by Jin Hien Lau.

And a photo essay by Wilfred Weegee.

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This is part 5 of Reza Rosli’s short story. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here.

One person I met had an interesting story about her own experience of running away from home. She had gone to London, where she had found work as a hairstylist, illegally, and hid away in an attic with her lesbian lover, who owned the salon. She did what she had to survive, she said, and once you get to a place big enough, it’s easy to disappear. She only came back for her son, whom she had left with her parents, a burden she cannot carry with her. In the end it was the irrepressible desire to see him again that made her come back, and somehow that thought comforted me. As they say, water cannot be cleaved. One day, perhaps kakak will come back, or if I go far enough, she will be the one to see me first.

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This is part 4 of Reza Rosli’s short story. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here.

So after Sofi confessed that—in different words—she had no desire for me, I secretly started to haunt drinking holes around town, bouncing from bar to bar after school, and returning home by midnight. My parents thought I had been spending time with Sofi as usual. They had long decided that my friendship with Sofi was healthy, and I showed no signs of breaking out the way my sister had, so they never questioned where I went. Outside, nobody suspected I was a minor. By all appearances I blended in easily with the yuppies I befriended, and having read precociously I could engage anyone in any topic of conversation. This was how I bartered for drinks with my yuppie friends, as I was the ideal and able wingman to play the dandy and always ready to strike up conversations with the women and bring them to the team. Years of being close yet distant to Sofi had taught me the art of conversation, peppered with double entrendres yet framed with sexless, unthreatening body language; and ironically I began meeting women who found that attractive and frequently offered to send me home; albeit after brief stopovers at their bachelorette flat or some deserted office parking lot. If Sofi suspected of my activities she never said anything, only huffing with displeasure every now and then when I rebuffed her late-night telephone calls, too inebriated with either alcohol or post-coital stupor to make the effort to listen to her chatter.

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This is part 3 of Reza Rosli’s short story. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Kakak was my best friend. When she didn’t come home, Mama would not tell me where she had gone. My parents constantly argued about what to do, about why she’s gone. That they knew the reason was undisputed. Kakak had left a note. She had made up her mind, and she’s not coming back. We knew it was not a kidnapping. Kakak always had an independent spirit, and sometimes she would tell me of her desires to travel to distant lands. She showed me all the places she’d go to, marked in the family atlas with little neon stickers. I always said I liked it better at home, why should she want to leave, but she just laughed. “You should get out of your books,” she said, “I’m going to be living in Talinn, and you can come visit.” Then she would fetch the atlas from the sitting room and make me figure out the route to Estonia. So when she finally left I wasn’t surprised. I was happy for her. Why my parents behaved the way they did was what I could not understand.

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This is part 2 of Reza Rosli’s short story. Read part 1 here.

Today my sister’s photo showed up and Sofi emailed it to me, which I am looking at now.

“It is her isn’t it?” the IM from Sofi says.

I say I’m not sure, weary of the years we had argued over what appears on these images, whether they mean anything or not. At one point, it was like when everything that appears means something in some way, and we looked to it for answers. We grew out of that, after learning of the nature of randomness and our own propensity to apply meaning to things when none exists; but Sofi remains convinced that God tells us things in many ways.

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Reza Rosli

My sister’s eyes, staring dolefully from the image on my computer screen, struck me dumb. Submissions made to the Post Secret site are known to be anonymous, so I knew any effort to find the one who had sent in the postcard would be futile.

Here is a portrait of her smiling widely on a sunlit beach, nondescript, except for a long, jutting rock formation looming in the background. These words, made of letters cut out of a magazine, or a newspaper, are pasted over it, “I’m sorry.” The postcard is undated.

Hope flares in my heart. She is alive. After all these years.

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