Tag: writing

The Last Stop on Mann’s Tour

Some hauntings don’t rattle chains. They wait in your notifications.

🕯️🌫️🚶‍♂️📖✨

I gathered with Elvis and the rest of the group, ready to grace ghostly lanes with gentle tiptoes. 

Our guide, Mann, was a fellow who engaged…though without unnecessary pomp. 

The buildings around the park were old. The streets, narrow.  Lamps hummed in a slightly strangled way, as if they hadn’t enough Strepsils.  

And we followed behind Mann like obedient shadows.

Mann launched into his spooky stories. But…they were…oddly personal.

Someone chortled suddenly. Uncomfortably.

The air thinned as the guide came to each stop.

The stories narrowed, like a zoom camera.

Oddly familiar – and tied to each group member. 

A woman who declined her mother’s last call – that same woman was now frantically tapping her mobile’s keypad. 

Then, there was the tale of the man who chose profit over humanity. That same man was shoving company leaflets. 

Then, there was the teen who caught footage of people falling off their bikes. He was filming a boy skidding past on a skateboard, yielding to the pavement.

Then Mann stopped with an abrupt flourish. He swiveled around from his position in front to face the group.

“These stories aren’t recorded hauntings. They’re our regrets. Our behaviours. Choices that replay in a Youtube loop long after we’ve made them. Check your phones.

Each group member scrolled through their message feeds and looked up, sheepish. 

With a missed notification. An unread message.       

“These spirits don’t flood buildings. They’re ours. Our neglected responsibilities.”

Suddenly, we weren’t afraid of darkness. Our fear? What awaited us at home.

The silence was loud. Clanking. 

Reminding.

And regret swarmed in, dark, hungry flies.

It crept over us quickly, a dangerous blanket. We dispersed, trying vainly to avoid it.

Mann again.  With a new group of ghost tourists. 

With their stories. Stories they must complete. 

🕯️🌫️🚶‍♂️📖✨

Original story by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental.

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Community Standards

When the light flickers, people behave. When it stops, they explain.

💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡

Tan here. A long-term resident of Block 345, Chestpeak Avenue.

It’s not a bad place to live. The residents of Block 345 are generally orderly folk who maintain the block well. And I like that they leave everything where it should be.

But that lamp. That idiotic lamp.

The flickering of that idiotic lamp was irritating. Irregular. Inconsistent.

It happened whenever I walked past, but some enjoyed uninterrupted illumination.

That was interesting to note.

Coincidence, of course.

💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡

Take Mdm Lim, for example. The one who waters others’ plants for them. That light would behave over her.

Now me? I’m not a plant person. I like to keep up with the news.

But I’m a retiree. I can’t afford regular newspapers, so I depend on…external help.

I sometimes…er…borrow the newspapers outside neighbours’ apartments when they’re not watching.

And that darned light would go on and off over me whenever I did.

💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡

I, Tan, believe that optics must be upheld. I’ve always done this at work.

And at home as well.

Sharing corridors requires community discipline, so I make sure to return the newspapers slightly earlier.

What is borrowed must return mah? Best practice.

Tan always obeys community standards.

💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡

They finally replaced the silly lamp. See? I said that the wiring was faulty.

Nothing unusual. Just the Town Council and its nonsense.

Things went back to normal since the lamp stopped flickering. Mdm Lim waters her own plants and conserves water for herself now.

Everyone else’s – not so important lah.

Me? Now that the lamp has stopped flickering, I have decided to borrow newspapers permanently.

No returning. For what? Everyone can see anyway.

💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡

So, everything in order, lah.

It WAS faulty wiring, like I said. Glad they corrected it.

Mdm Lim waters her own plants and conserves water for herself now.

I borrow…but when no one else is in the corridor.

I don’t like that light now. It shows. Too well.

💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡🏢💡

Original Singaporean microfiction by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental

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Written Too Straight

Society expected perfection from Sandra. But is perfection perfect?

📚✔️❌❓

Ms. Sandra Lee always arrived in class five minutes before her English lesson was to begin. There was no reason for this day to be any different. 

The classroom had already risen before she stepped in. The lights were already on, and her students, quiet and standing, ready to greet.

But their morning salutation was not for her. 

She’d always had a problem writing in a straight line on a ledger-less chalkboard. 

But her name was on it this day.

She already knew the kids – there was no need for it.

It was in a line – written by someone else.

Too straight.

📚✔️❌❓

The students offered their polite greeting – almost too polite.

Their grace, too well-crafted.

Responses – too normal.

Sandra observed the teacher – an uncanny replica of herself, doling out marked homework and instructions. 

The students, responding for once without any quiet rebellion. 

They had finally accepted her for who she was. 

But this was not her. Their politeness to this new her – her own erasure.

📚✔️❌❓

The formulae offered by Sandra’s replacement – herself – were doubtless.

Efficient. Perfect. 

The students accepted the model solutions she offered without a single raised hand in protest. 

No digression. No lingering questions. 

The teaching was excellent, but without an ounce of warmth. 

📚✔️❌❓

Then, the letter on her desk.

Thanking her for her service. 

The parents were happy with Sandra’s replacement – she taught in the way the students recognized.

There was improvement. Formulae were clocked correctly, according to the letter. She had taught well, it said.

Just not good enough for – herself.

📚✔️❌❓

Sandra cleared her desk, putting her books and now needless worksheets in a box. 

She carried it past the classroom and looked in at herself, finally explaining the formulae without a single missed equation.

But as she passed the classroom window, the replacement – her perfect upgrade – asked a question.

Then wrote the wrong sum on the board. 

And vanished at the sound of the bell.

📚✔️❌❓

The students with half the needed formulae.

📚✔️❌❓

Original microfiction by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental.

If you like this story, do join me on Patreon! Buy this blog a coffee — it keeps the words flowing and the lights Your kind donation via Paypal would be greatly appreciated!

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.

If you like this story, do join me on Patreon! Buy this blog a coffee — it keeps the words flowing and the lights Your kind donation via Paypal would be greatly appreciated!

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

Lines in Brown

This day in 1919 marks the Great Boston Molasses Flood, when a molasses storage tank burst in Boston’s East End and consumed 21 lives.

21 lives lost, and undocumented.

While history records the events, it doesn’t record the names.

Some histories cannot be left on paper — they wait to be remembered.

🟤📄🕯️⚖️🟤

Criminalist Eleanor’s job was her haven – she adored the precision and the intimate attention to detail it needed. Years in the Commercial Affairs department of the police force had ingrained foolproof method and reliability – traits that made her renowned.

January 15 took her to an abandoned industrial site – one where tension and chaos were still very much married. Molasses had erupted in waves of brown  from industrial containers, drowning 21 workers in viscous sea of dessert thick enough to build another Berlin wall . The atmosphere overwhelmed in a sickening instant.

Molasses lines still trailed along the sides of tanks, creeping from something – unseen. Brown and sticky. Gripping. Unyielding. 

Accusing.

But Eleanor was but a monitor of records, not memory. She was tasked with verifying the truth – not on reflection of responsibility.

The sickly-sweet dessert was a trained assassin assailing Eleanor’s nose – the cloying scent wrapped her nostrils with a vengeance. The air bore sweetness where none should be. Time had softened, but not erased it – it didn’t move. But remained almost deathly unsettled. 

She had recorded the event before, without missing a beat. 

Safely. Accurately. 

But the events and dates did not sync. The numbers bore no weight – meaningless. The dates had no breath. 

Accuracy had trumped reverence. 

The names of the 21 lost souls, dissolved with the viscosity that had enfolded them. 

Then, the viscous remains reshaped. 

Hardened. 

Becoming a tangled mass of brown limbs, melded together in linked chains that could not be broken. 

Then they rose, in a circle, surrounding Eleanor. 

Approaching her, but not reanching. 

21 links, glistening with dessert gleam. 

Reminding. 

Eleanor stared at the forms, too dumbstruck for words. Mesmerised – but aware enough to find them odd.

None of them spilt forward. None screamed.

She remembered the file that she had put on the table beside her, open to a blank page.

The figures stared, nodding.

And she understood. 

The record she had to complete. That she would complete. 

And the day she would finally mark with remembrance. 

🟤📄🕯️⚖️🟤

Original story by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental.

If you like this story, do join me on Patreon! Buy this blog a coffee — it keeps the words flowing and the lights Your kind donation via Paypal would be greatly appreciated!

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

Roots Remember

This day in history, Henry Ford patented the soybean car. Atypical. Even amusing.

The car wasn’t meant to last – it would wither into the soil, with corn growing where the engine once slept.

Sometimes the smallest, unseen roots yield the sweetest harvest.

🍃🍂🍃🍂🍃🍂🍃🍂🍃🍂

If there was one thing Elias Goh had lots of on his hands, it was time.  And the retired horticulturist spent it squatting beside stubborn saplings near his Housing Board apartment. The young trees asked for patience, as trees were wont to do.

Elias worked where few cared to look. Neighbors scoffed at the slow-growing saplings, chiding Elias for wasting time and community funds. His daughter asked, “Dad, why all the worthless effort?” But Elias knew that growth pushed back against being hurried. 

And then…

A notice that inflamed the skin, in angry, red ink – a redevelopment notice. 

The government had marked the land for demolition. Total destruction –

Including his little green labours of love. 

Still, Elias, ever stoic, never raised a word in protest. He never wrestled with negative endings. With meticulous fervor, he labeled his saplings and left them behind, along with a set of cryptic instructions. 

“Growth is timeless.”

After Elias stopped tending to the unfortunate saplings, they caught the eye of Ah Lam, the assistant groundskeeper. The plants leaves touched together, almost pleading. He remembered Elias’ words :

“Roots matter.”

He took the sapling and replanted it in the estate’s community garden – before any demolishing could reduce it to nothingness. 

The onset of El Nina meant the painful and inevitable – a drought. 

Yet, the tiny, relocated sapling came to the fore- the fruit it bore , ravishing and juice-filled. 

The harvest had come – out of season. 

Children began to gather, in droves, beneath the now-revered sapling. 

They never knew its planter. The one who nourished it – nameless. 

But the lone sapling’s fruit had given him one. 

🍃🍂🍃🍂🍃🍂🍃🍂🍃🍂

Original story by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental.

If you like this story, do join me on Patreon! Buy this blog a coffee — it keeps the words flowing and the lights Your kind donation via Paypal would be greatly appreciated!

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

Veil of Shadows

1964 marks the year President Lyndon B Johnson initiated a War on Poverty, aimed at increasing employment opportunities, revamping education, and boosting healthcare. 

While reviews of the polices had a mixed tone, it did decline by about 8%.

Some vows like these, however, remain unfulfilled. 

Reprieve and fairness is sought.

Promises spoken. Justice delivered. Echoes that endure.

⚡👁️🗨️🕊️📜🔥

Murmurs of excitement ran through the conference hall as Mayor

Carl Sim launched into the speech his eager audience was craving. A throng of journalists, waiting to fill their pages, gathered in the corner, asking sensitivity breaching questions. Their pens hovered above notepads waiting to serve as canvases. 

Everyone was too preoccupied to notice the faint shimmers at the periphery of the room. His palms were slippery with nerves – the room held its breath. Sentient shadows scaled the walls – artists with hidden secrets none wanted to know. 

Carl cleared his throat and began his speech, one filled with glowing promises of sweeping changes that would enhance lives. 

No one noticed the very slight tilt of their chairs – even as they were sitting on them. Papers fluttered in the windless air-conditioned hall, drifting like white gowns above the ground.

The room was – living. With a heartbeat that didn’t sync with Carl’s. As he spoke, a chill worked its way up his legs through his spine. A cloying smell of crisp, pressed white linen grabbed the air.

And it wasn’t air-conditioning draft.

The paper gowns gathered and filled – with forms from a world unknown. 

They were ageless. Visible. Slowly approaching.

Imposing. 

The crowd in the room took tentative steps backward, mouths hung wide open. 

Then, the room erupted in gasps and whispers.

Screams ricocheted off the walls. Bodies piled against doors, grabbing handles.

Pressing against each other as they tried to exit. 

Carl’s pulse raced faster than a Formula One driver’s car. A mix of awe and dread filled his being.

The vows he had made all along, to the millions he had soothed?

Mere words.

The guardians had made their dreaded – and expected – entrance, drifting with logic not to be challenged. 

And vindication for words unmaterialised. For people -unwanted. 

Then, chaos unfolded. Not haphazardly – but in structured, elegant patterns.  Tables had overturned outside the hall -lifts were malfunctioning.Officials around Carl scrambled to protect him, but he remained stoic.

His face – unreadable. 

The guardians drifted to the stage, mouths fixed and straightened. Gasps of disbelief filled the room. The smell of smoke and wonder enveloped the crowd.

Carl saw the gnawing gap between his empty promises and the painful realities the people in his town dealt with.

Increasing crime. Inadequate public schooling. 

The guardians’ feet traced the steps of the stage.

One by one. 

Then, they vanished. Leaving overturned chairs, flickering lights and chaotic whispers in their wake.

The air had an empty heaviness few could articulate. 

Mayor Carl knew that some forces of poverty – tense family dynamics, unchanging mindsets – were beyond his control. 

As ambiguous as the guardians’ warning of justice. 

He carried the weight with him, along with their lingering shadows. 

A light flickered in his eyes. Their echo resonated, undying.

⚡👁️🗨️🕊️📜🔥

If you like this story, do join me on Patreon! Buy this blog a coffee — it keeps the words flowing and the lights Your kind donation via Paypal would be greatly appreciated!

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

Once a year, mothers gather before dawn to fast, pray, and wait.

Sakat Chauth is a Hindu festival not marked by celebration, but by endurance — a quiet vow made on behalf of a child who cannot yet speak for themselves.

No grand promises are asked of the heavens. Only this:

Let the little ones stay.

🕯️🙏🏼🕯️🙏🏼🕯️🙏🏼

A blanket of quiet covered the city. The region of Alumbra was in winter slumber – a go-to for quiet benediction. The bare branches of the trees above were Anita’s soul – it needed refilling. 

Anita took purposeful steps towards the shrine on the morning of 8 Jan. Each one was a little echo – a prayer for her three-month-old daughter. 

Cancer had consumed the little girl – with recovery standing ahead at a hopeless distance. Sakat Chauth – the Hindu festival of maternal devotion – held significant weight. It was the child’s only reprieve.

She pressed her palms together, enjoying the warmth that slowly grew against the chill. 

Memories of gurgles and the tugs of tiny hands tugged at her heart. Each thought of little Ila was like a little ember that warmed her spirit – a spark that lifted it above the frost. She followed the rhythm of her prayers in her mind, as if choreographing a dance of hope. 

A cacophony of activity resounded throughout the temple, its ground awash in a tapestry of vibrant colour.

The sacred grounds seemed unaware of the sacred petitions she was about to offer. Shouts and laughter brushed against her ears like wind caressing bare branches. 

A bevy of women gathered for the Sakat Chauth, their hands clasped in benevolent reverence. Everyone was lost in thought – even the frost was indifferent to her vigil.

Her hands joined in prayer, Anita whispered her hopes for her child into the chilly January air. Candlelight danced around her, as if in tune with Illa’s need. As the flames swayed in almost perfect unison, the weight her heart hauled grew lighter – she prostrated in a relief she hadn’t felt since her daughter was born. Quiet tears drenched her cheeks.

She felt a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and turned to its source. The mother next to her nodded. “The mother of a child in need knows.”

The two women prostrated again, in complete tandem. The flames continued their dance of quiet hope, warming them with gentle resolution.

Anita left the temple, her heart syncing with the quiet hum of  bustling Alumbra. Vidhya, the other mother, followed, her own heartbeat providing a solid, rhythmic harmony. A breeze tossed their plaits gently, carrying with it hope fused with joyful relief. 

For Ila. And Meera.

The frost no longer bit – that light had chiselled, and broken through.

🕯️🙏🏼🕯️🙏🏼🕯️🙏🏼

If you like this story, do join me on Patreon! Buy this blog a coffee — it keeps the words flowing and the lights Your kind donation via Paypal would be greatly appreciated!

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

Moments Between Years

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

☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕

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. 

☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕

If you like this story, do join me on Patreon! Buy this blog a coffee — it keeps the words flowing and the lights Your kind donation via Paypal would be greatly appreciated!

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

Through the Cosmic Lens

Today is observed in Christian Tradition as the Feast of the Holy Innocents – we observe the beauty of innocence this Yuletide.

Innocence that power consumes too easily.

Knowledge, power and recognition – at what cost?

✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐

Jeremy Tong was a recluse – he preferred the company of the universe, stars, and all, to the inane chatter of people. The young astronomer sought to map the universe’s canvas.

To be the astronomer with knowledge uncapped.

He set up a telescope on the edge of a cliff. It could trace constellations – what was beyond the universe.

The stars blinked every night, their curiosity becoming insatiable.

And Jeremy’s telescope glared at him with its cheeky lens.

The device picked up readings – what it was supposed to do. But these were – odd. The stars felt – alive. Too alive and aware.

✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐

The young astronomer was fiddling with his cosmic toy one fateful evening when the lens fogged over and became – strange.

It showed images – not of stars in their renowned patterns, but of how life was to unfold.

He saw himself, a midlife astronomer, scanning newspaper headlines. Seeking recognition.

Visions of himself as an old man gnawed at his mind’s recesses – peering at the sky, wondering what the vast black horizon lay in front of him.

HIS life.

Glimpses of the future burned into his mind – and not painlessly. Each image cut off a piece of him, as if he had surrendered himself to the cosmos.

The line between his reality and the universe blurred.

✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐

The telescope’s lens pulled back and enlarged, almost beckoning. In its lens – a sentient being. Waiting for him. It watched him, demanding his complete faithfulness. Complete belief.

For infinite knowledge in return.

The pulse of infinite minds throbbed in his veins, each beat wrenching a part of his soul.

He drew back from the lens, aghast. It dawned – knowledge wasn’t just making observations through lens – it was a transaction.

✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐

He angled his head for another look – and paused. One more glance that meant infinite knowledge.

The lens’s eternal ownership.

That final glance held both intimidation and promise.

“Come…or vanish.” The stars seemed to whisper, almost giggling.

The freedom of life – or the universe’s secret manual.

He peeked at the lens once more – and saw himself reflected in infinity.

✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐

The telescope remained on the observation deck, its lens waiting –

For others who craved discovery.

Who were aware of the cost of knowledge – but willing to pay.

The cliff stood, still sentient, still quiet.

Guarding its secrets.

Secrets best kept behind locked doors.

It rose. Patient. Hungry.

Another astronomer peered through the open mouth of its lens.

✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐✨🪐

Original story by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental

If you like this story, do join me on Patreon! Buy this blog a coffee — it keeps the words flowing and the lights Your kind donation via Paypal would be greatly appreciated!

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