The Scarecrow Who Walked Out

Twenty years of loyal service. Three days of AI innovation. One employee who has finally had enough.

Stanley was wondering what it was worth. He had been an exemplary scarecrow—he’d protected Farmer Higgins’s farm for years.

Twenty years of outstanding cornfield labour, with nary a day of annual leave. He was a pillar of the Scarecrow Community, and a model employee; yet his employment contract was manipulation that favoured Higgins’s terms.

Oh, if only others knew the storms he had weathered. The blasted, ungrateful crows. Still, he stood firm. It was in his job description.

Then, Farmer Higgins made a major productivity decision. He purchased an expensive AI-powered scarecrow, Model SC-3000. The machine boasted motion sensors, flashing lights, and a scarecrow’s primordial function—automated bird detection.

Farmer Higgins proudly announced the technological transition as he went by the field.

“Old crow, show him the ropes,” he instructed tersely.

The new recruit received a protective canopy and a charging station all his own. Stanley remained open to the elements.

Technology had received protection. The old scarecrow? Precipitation.

After just three days, the SC-3000 received the Employee of the Month award. Farmer Higgins praised the AI-powered phenomenon for its efficiency and contributions to agricultural innovation.

Stanley discovered that the robot scarecrow had been credited with twenty years—his twenty years—of agricultural protection. AND had a new charging station as a reward in the cornfield.

Stanley? Farmer Higgins gave him straw to replace his stuffing. And the honor of posing beside the SC-3000.

The ceremony was brief. Stanley’s humiliation wasn’t.

Apparently, his loyalty and diligence had reached Farmer Higgins’s expiration date.

Something inside Stanley snapped.

And so Stanley prepared what he never thought he would in twenty years—a resignation letter. Effective immediately. It cited employee exploitation, a lack of benefits, and a clear lack of career progression.

Farmer Higgins refused to acknowledge it, arguing a lack of animation. Scarecrows, therefore, couldn’t be considered employees.

Stanley pointed out the contradiction.

“You have been assigning me duties for twenty years!”

The farmer was irate.

“You cannot abandon your post!”

Stanley, by now completely fed up, hopped off the pole and walked away.

Farmer Higgins stared after him, open-mouthed.

Mirrors of the Mind by Michelle Liew is a collection of psychological and supernatural short stories that explore the quiet unease beneath ordinary moments. These are not tales of spectacle, but of subtle fracture — where memory distorts, silence speaks, and the self is not always singular. In these stories, what is unseen often carries the greatest weight, and what lingers is not what is shown, but what is felt.

The White Field

It’s Penguin Awareness Day, and being the cute junkie that I am, I’d like to pay tribute to these wobbly fellows.
They are cute. They are also firm and stand by those in the colony who need them. Even when forgotten.
But the day isn’t just theirs. It belongs to anyone who has stood stoically by others in the face of any adversity.
Not all guardians are remembered. All are necessary.
🐧 ❄️ ❄️ 🐧 ❄️
The snowstorm had created an unending white sea – one that Buzz and his family navigated year after year. White waves swam from an omnipresent sky, covering the colony not with protection, but with threat.
The sea was rogue this year – the waves splashed forward without warning. A snow wave had almost drowned Buzz – not that the rest of the colony paid heed. Not even his parents.
He waddled painfully past the wave and looked ahead. No other penguin.
But one. A little chick.
He positioned himself beside it, nudging it forward with his beak, relieved when it finally trudged a few steps forward.
Snow continued falling; white curtains shrouded the Antartic landscape as Buzz forged ahead, a non-present adult in his colony.
The South Pole wind howled her discontent. Resilience reigned over her as the penguins made do, rotating their positions to keep the young intact.
The outer edges of the colony bore the cold. Buzz and his adult comrades slipped, uninstructed and observed, into different parts of it to shield the little ones. Like Buzz, the other birds guarded them with stoic silence.
They could have moved within the brood – duty bade them not to, and they acquiesced, without a chirp.
The snowstorm ended as suddenly as it started, leaving massive white hills in her wake. The sun peeked behind soft pillowy clouds, indicating safety to the birds as they ploughed on without pause.
The little ones, their soft grey fur and blubber offering warmth, no longer needed Buzz for protection. They plodded just as relentlessly as the elders, paying him no heed as they forged ahead.
They arrived safely at the next snow hill, their footfalls unheard and unseen. Like Buzz, they would grow and guard, unnoticed and unrecorded in a white field.
🐧 ❄️ ❄️ 🐧 ❄️
Original story by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental.

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Moments Between Years

This new year, let’s remember that life’s in the little things.

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Morning had just broken, but Elsie found her thoughts tracing the kitchen floor.

The first hour of the year was calm, quiet – giving room for pause. Singapore was still, but her apartment was buzzing with the noise of leftover wrappers, party poppers and half-finished cans of beer from the New Year’s Eve party the night before.

A cuckoo bird and its mate did a series of hops on the railing, as if filling the small gaps between the noise. A park lamp flickered, looking bent, as if conforming to the weight of the prior year’s unseen moments.

She strolled to the corner coffeeshop, giving silent nods to people she knew only briefly. Each step she took was a checklist of micro-decisions – taking the scenic route past the river, choosing which text message to reply to, skipping her usual cafe stop because it was too crowded. The new year was a mirror of the year before. The choices she made then rippled quietly into today.

She found herself seated on a park bench at lunch, the flavour of new year leftovers absent on her tongue. Her mind wandered as clouds drifted idly; children laughed, their chuckles filling the void in her soul.

She knew that void. The emptiness of life’s unnoticed textures -children’s laughter, an elderly woman’s chuckle-trumped the resolutions she made a year earlier. The pause before laughter was a reminder that the thought put into laughter – the little details – mattered as much as the laughter itself. Awareness in life’s small acts is what made a difference.

She returned to her apartment, opened a few letters she’d ignored over the new year and sipped her now rancid tea.

But for the first time in a long while, she felt as if she mattered. The clock on the TV console ticked steadily, indifferent to her presence. But she felt -there. Unrushed, with no need to know what happened next. She had already arrived.

She dialled her mother’s number, ready to finally speak to her.

Ready to address the spat they’d had a few weeks earlier.

Ready to meet the year ahead.

Because she was in the moment.

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The Ledger of Waves

Today marks the day of the 2004 Tsunami that struck the shores of several countries worldwide.

Leaving devastation.

Loss.

A weight that must be remembered.

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I watched, my waves tense, as children left chocolate wrappers on the pristine sand. Fishermen lingered at the shore, ignoring the curious dolphins poking their noses into their nets. I regarded them coldly – patient and endless, as they pursued their selfish joys.

Waiting.

They were close. Too close.

The tension caused my wavy hands to clench, ready to unleash. The veins in them were about to burst. I found myself listening to my rising impatience.

I pulled back further, gathering myself. My form stretched across horizons, waiting to release. There were the lovers. The thoughtless fishermen. The wrapper-throwing children. I recall bearing the careless weight of their ways. Each mistake, each inconsiderate act, each denial – bore into my waves.

My spindly, watery hands stilled. Grey covered the skies, along with a blanket of silence. The wind stopped blowing on my cue. Thunder growled softly, ready when I was. I stayed upright, silent, as all on the distant shores laughed without care. I waited, testing their false confidence. Nothing they did – wasted food, offensive plastic bottles – escaped my notice. I stood poised.

Ready for the inevitable.

Meanwhile, plastic bottles lay, unrisen corpses, on the shore. An angry crowd of thunderclods gathered, silent, in the background. In my watery hands were dangerous nets, uneaten food, dead fish – ready to return to those who owned them.

I carried their forgotten burdens. Each small, yet costly mistake.

Their responsibility. In my grasp.

My dirty blue fingers painfully remembered each transgression. Each misstep cut my sides.

Still, I lingered, patient, endless. Responsibility cavorted, unaware, on the trash-ridden shore.

I remembered. Always remembered. So would they.

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Please find a book of my horror microfiction, Echoes in the Dark, free for download here.

Imparting Differences

Today is the International Day of Human Solidarity – one when a jigsaw becomes completely fitted.

When walls part, and partitions close.

When differences meet, magic happens.

🌟

The city of Parting was – parted. There were many parts, true to its name.

Every district spoke a different language. And within each language, a separate dialect.

Rules veered like cars as they steered from street to street. Neighbours saw each other – only with their eyes. Glances fleeted, lasting shorter than seconds.

🐾

Kevin frowned at George’s odd dances. Harry squirmed at Sheila’s crooked smile – one fixed on her face due to facial paralysis from an accident.

They laughed at Juno – he wrote, but climbing Everest was easier than reading.

But the little child smiled like an angel.

Then, the Mayor threw them a ball into a curve that was already curvy.

The Day of Differences. A town holiday.

To mark the day and make it as COMFORTABLE for the edgy as he could, he PAIRED the townsfolk.

Two worlds collided in a day.

Leila, the quiet librarian, frowned at George’s heady dance moves. Tom, the straightlaced mathematician, baulked at Ben’s cheeky eyebrow raising.

The differences sounded louder than cymbals.

Hearts listened, though minds ignored.

✨

The diversity blanketed Parting – now Imparting – and beyond.

Leila held Dance Appreciation Days at the town library – with George’s help. Ben spun records at the radio station with the help of a metronome that Tom assembled – after a mouthful of quirky complaints.

And containers were no longer separate – the differences melted hard plastic partitions.

Into nothingness.

🌟

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The Last Pour

Every sip tastes of desire…and loss.

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Wine bottle labels. Pieces of white paper, gracing hour-glass-shaped green glass. Marcy’s life.

The avid collector of rare wines was a recluse who was more than slightly off-the-wall–the smell of her eccentric apartment was cloying, filled with the scent of grapes. Shelves were lined with prides of her collections, caked with layers of dust. Marcy wore her refined palate like a proud peacock. She could name the wines she sipped blindfolded–and that was a waste. She memorised the scent of every grape she’d kissed.

Life became less of a rut when a mysterious, unmarked bottle arrived on her doorstep with a simple note–handwritten in looping cursive, curling like chimney smoke. The red liquid within the bottle gleamed like red rubies, as if it knew the secrets within her heart. She took the first sip–alone, yet not quite. It slid over her tongue, sweet, persistent, like a memory tugging at her soul.

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The wine had a familiar flavour—but she couldn’t quite place it.

Then, a faint, airy breath—her own voice.

Chanting a long-forgotten mantra.

“Crave the taste, lose in haste.”

Marcy set her glass on the table, almost spilling the wine over in her start. Was it the flavour of cured grapes? Or grapes and alcohol–

In her mind?

“Crave the taste, lose in haste…”

A photo above the fireplace. Of herself, as a little girl, pig tails uncut.

Firm. Without the feel of a hairbrush.

With a naive, untainted smile.

Crave the taste.

Lose in haste.

The little girl swirled in a whirlpool of mental smog–and vanished.

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Marcy raised a trembling hand, reaching once again for the fated glass. The bottle of wine made suggestions. Beckoned.

Its surface shimmered–a secret untold.

She lifted it to her lips and took in its smoky aroma.

Along with something too familiar. A little grating.

She swooned a little as a picture of herself, a child, surfaced at its brim.

The warmth of happiness, naivete and sunlight, streaming through her window.

Casting a glow on her soft skin, yet unblemished.

The wine swirled beneath her tongue. a drink soothing in its forbidden form.

And then…Marcy, the child.

Crave the taste….lose the haste.

Her innocent form hazy, against the taste of succulence.

Marcy gazed at her childhood self fading–gradually, in each glass section of the window.

She reached.

No more.

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Marcy’s fingers slipped, but her reflexes weren’t slow–yet. She held on to the wine glass.

Tighter.

A lingering, cloying scent filled the room.

The wine bottle stood, watchful.

Mocking.

Daring her to take another sip.

Marcy fingered the glass, her desire for another taste almost insatiable–but paused.

Fear began its grip.

She caught sight of her reflection in the glass window.

Too stretched.

The lights on the ceiling sparked on and off.

Her shadow, once still on the floor, grew longer.

The sweetness of the wine cloyed, thicker, on her tongue.

Her reflection in the window started to haze over.

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Marcy raised her glass to her lips, ready for a final sip.

The bottle seemed to breathe; the wine swirled with a life of its own.

She paused, the longing for the taste of the old wine almost drowning.

She caught sight of her image in the glass window–only its legs.

The lights above her clicked on and off, the rate increasing.

The reflection in the glass window had shrunk–to its feet.

She was being consumed.

She stared at the wine bottle.

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Then, at the image in the mirror.

The feet had vanished.

The label on the wine bottle read: “Red Nook.”

With the letters O more rounded than she had first seen them.

On it, a picture of a charming chateau, its branches curved.

Almost smiling.

The wine glass fell to the floor, shattering into pieces.

Marcy?

Marcy no longer.

Vanished.

She had sipped, sinned–and succumbed.

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Please find a book of my horror microfiction, Echoes in the Dark, free for download here.

Lanterns for the Unseen

Prologue

Each August, Taoists and Buddhists mark the Hungry Ghost Festival—a nod to their ancestors, with offerings of food, incense and paper money.

Wandering, hungry souls are included in those offerings–and remembrance for our own.

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Light from burning incense candles danced on the tree-lined, Singaporean streets of Sembing, Singapore, guiding footseteps–

Along with the Unseen.

They burned in human-crafted clusters, their smoke curling in waves, opening an unobstructed, tree-lined path.

Shadows stretched across the pavements, the candles their trustworthy sentinels–guardians of eternal devotion.

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20-year-old Alvin Cheng watched as his Father scattered prayer sheets near the incense bin, his eyes tracing the flickering lights of the candles.

“Boy, offer a joss stick to our ancestors.” It was Alvin’s turn to burn one for his grandfather.

Alvin’s hesitant hands reached for the incense stick and a ream of paper money–the currency of the ones who had left.

He bore the weight of forgotten ancestors –and his young shoulders sank uncomfortably.

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He threw the paper money into the bin, the flames consuming each note with ethereal gusto.

The streets echoed with promises once made.

He appeared, his form gently pressing against the trees. He stopped at the bin, eyes turned to Alvin, quietly pleading without words.

With a spectral hunger that needed acknowledging. He turned his pale face to the packet of chicken rice on the grass, his face etched with longing.

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It was a look that vanquished Alvin’s Gen Z scepticism–and fear.

The spectre was seeking vengeance, or the petrified gazes of those who still lived—it simply wanted to eat.

A place.

A name.

The young sceptic took the joss stick from his father’s outstretched hand.

He lit it and placed it at the side of the pavement.

The spirit drifted over and hovered.

Its spectral form gleamed.

The light from the candles danced with its fresh glow.

Alvin placed the packet of chicken rice in front of joss sticks. The aromatic scent of succulent chicken, herbs and spices wafted in the air, teasing his nostrils.

And the spirit’s.

It gazed at Alvin, the pale, yet unclear features of its face slowly bending-upturning in a faint smile.

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The ghost drifted away from the candle, hovering near the incense bin.

Tapping his father’s shoulder–almost with urgency.

Its features came together, now vivid, striking.

Alvin gazed at them–they were

too familiar.

But beamed with generational kindness.

In that instant, he knew the offering of chicken rice wasn’t mere kindness–it was piety.

The elderly spirit faded–but not out of the young man’s mind.

“Stay full, Ah Kong (grandpa).”

For the deceased–unknown and familiar.

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Please find a book of my horror microfiction, Echoes in the Dark, free for download here.

My Favourite Food

My Favorite Food

The food of my life is pizza. From the classic Margherita to those with exotic combinations of ingredients, there always seems to be one which is new and delicious. Its texture and flavour are second to none, and it’s simply impossible for me to resist a freshly cooked slice. I have many memories associated with eating pizza, from birthday parties to special occasions. The smell of the hot and savoury toppings combined with melted cheese is an indelible part of my childhood. The most important part of pizza, however, is the dough. It’s one thing that separates a good pizza from a great one. A freshly made crust should have a crispy exterior and a soft, fluffy interior. It should be light, yet flavorful. A great pizza maker knows how to make the perfect crust every time I bite into one.

Toppings are an indispensable part of my favourite dish. I love experimenting with different combinations of ingredients, from traditional Italian herbs and spices to more adventurous choices like prosciutto, artichoke hearts, and truffle oil. No matter what toppings I choose, they always seem to work together perfectly.

Finally, the sauce is what ties it all together. It can range from a light tomato base to a thick, cheesy blend. No matter what the recipe calls for, I always get excited when I see that famous red and yellow circle on my pizza box.

Pizza is not just a dish to me; it’s an experience. From the smell of the dough cooking in the oven to the first bite of that hot and savoury slice, pizza is something I look forward to every time. It’s a comfort food that I can always count on to make me feel happy and satisfied. There’s nothing quite like pizza, and I’m sure it will always have a special place in my heart. That’s why it will forever be the food I crave.