Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction

by Dominica Malcolm

  AMOK

  An Anthology of

  Asia-Pacific

  Speculative Fiction

  Edited by Dominica Malcolm

  Solarwyrm Press

  2014

  The short stories within are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Thank you for supporting Solarwyrm Press by obtaining this electronic book legitimately. If you did not obtain this electronic book by legitimate means, please support the authors and publisher by either purchasing a copy, reviewing it, or recommending it to friends.

  Published and produced by Solarwyrm Press

  http://www.solarwyrm.com

  Cover design by Jun Hun Yap

  http://www.junhunyap.com

  Production by Dominica Malcolm

  This anthology in its current form © 2014

  Each story © 2013 their respective authors

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9805084-4-4

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  - Dominica Malcolm >

  The Donor

  - Brett Adams (Australia) >

  Moon Rabbit

  - Jo Wu (China) >

  Operation Toba 2049

  - Kris Williamson (Malaysia) >

  Target: Heart

  - Recle Etino Vibal (Philippines) >

  Dreams

  - Tabitha Sin ((New) Hong Kong) >

  Bumbye! Said the Candelarios

  - Ailia Hopkins (Hawai‘i) >

  Kitsune

  - KZ Morano (Japan) >

  The Volunteer

  - TR Napper (Thailand & Vietnam) >

  Bright Student

  - Terence Toh (Malaysia) >

  No Name Islands

  - Kawika Guillermo (Indonesia) >

  The Dead of the Night

  - Barry Rosenberg (Australia) >

  Yamada’s Armada

  - Eeleen Lee (Singapore) >

  Love and Statues

  - Jax Goss (New Zealand) >

  Gone Fishing

  - Jo Thomas (Pacific Ocean) >

  Shadows of an Ancient Battle

  - Daniel A. Kelin, II (Hawai‘i) >

  In Memoriam

  - Fadzlishah Johanabas (Malaysia) >

  Lola’s Lessons

  - Shenoa Carroll-Bradd (Philippines) >

  When the Rice was Gone

  - Dominica Malcolm (South Korea) >

  The Healer

  - Aashika Nair (India) >

  Caves of Noble Truth and Dangerous Knowledge

  - Celeste A. Peters (China) >

  The Seventh Month

  - Agnes Ong (Malaysia) >

  And Then It Rained

  - Rebecca Freeman (Australia) >

  Where the Fireflies Go

  - NJ Magas (Japan) >

  The King of Flotsamland

  - Tom Barlow (North Pacific Gyre) >

  Introduction

  Dominica Malcolm

  As an Australian who knew a number of excellent Australian short story writers, in the early stages of conceptualising my first anthology, my instinct had been to have a collection of speculative fiction set in Australia. Then I had a request to include New Zealand as a setting, and once that door opened, it occurred to me that living in Malaysia and sharing my writing with those I met in Kuala Lumpur meant I at the very least had some connections to help me spread the word within the region. It then ended up being no surprise to me that the majority of submissions came from and/or were set in Australia and Malaysia.

  When I put up the call for submissions, I was specifically looking for the kind of diversity that doesn’t seem so common in mainstream fiction. Not only is the Asia-Pacific region home to a vast number of races—which are captured very well in this anthology—but I was also hoping to find more characters both young and old, from non-Western religious backgrounds, women, LGBT, and disabled characters. I am thankful to say all of this diversity is represented in this collection.

  Whilst the stories feature settings in Australia, China, Hawai‘i, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Pacific Ocean, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam, the authors are also diverse, living across the globe in Australia, Canada, China, England, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the USA.

  As well as diversity, I was naturally also looking for good quality speculative fiction, which I generally define as “real world settings in the past, present, or future, with science-fiction or fantasy elements.” The stories I selected range from using traditional mythology of the country or region they’re set in, re-imagined mythology or other fantasy, and possible futures, which includes both new technologies and dystopias.

  I’m really proud of the selection of stories I was able to include. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

  The Donor

  Brett Adams

  ~ Australia ~

  I wasn’t born blind.

  At least, that’s what my mother told me.

  My sight was stolen by a man calling himself Doctor Fletcher. He gave me the wrong drops—the wrong treatment entirely—for swollen eyes, and ran away when the shit hit the fan. Left me blind at six months, when I was just beginning to drink in the kaleidoscope, only to have it wink out in the time it took to draw breath.

  That’s the gist of what Mum told me. I don’t remember any of it.

  As I grew, it fell to my remaining senses to give me a kind of sight. With my ears I learned how to map a room by the subtle play of echo from texture. With my nose I fixed upon a thousand different scents undetected by mere mortals. With my fingers I grasped the Elephant—hide, tusk and trunk. And so I saw, after all.

  At least, that’s what my teachers told me.

  But the sense I held most dear is the common sort. It’s a pity it kept silent on that fateful day in August all those years ago, instead of screaming how crazy it was for three kids—one blind, one deaf, and one… other—to be on the cliffs of Blackwall Reach just shy of midnight, winter’s breath heavy on our necks, hunting for a missing man.

  Did I mention we were twelve? Three boys of twelve at Blackwall Reach in the witching hour. Not very Disney. But we figured we had the pooled resources of a thirty-six year old man. Treble the feet and hands in any case. Funny to think that thirty-six was the missing man’s age.

  Why Blackwall? That had been Barny’s idea.

  I remember it vividly. Earlier that day he’d said, “Paahlie,” (my name is Paulus) in that voice of his, which sounded like a crow in flight. I liked Barny’s crow’s caw. It had a singsong quality. The other kids might have liked it too if they’d shut up long enough to listen, instead of gibbering to each other to bugger up his lip reading. That was before we changed school, mind you. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “Paahlie,” he cawed, “Let’s go.”

  We were killing time in a foodhall after school, and I thought he meant we should leave. I sucked harder on my shake and made to get up.

  “No.” He laughed in that breathy way of his. “Not here. Blackwall.”

  He was a brave bugger, Barny. I could have travelled the world if I had a fiver for every time some well-meaning adult told me how brave I was. So independent, so ‘autonomous’—and blind!

  But Barny had it worse. His dad had belted his hearing from him when he was six. He didn’t have a mum. No one else knew how he’d lost his hearing. He told only me, and that’s the other reason I harboured a special fondness for Barny.r />
  Me, brave? It was Barny who walked home from school every day after he lost his hearing, just like normal. Home to that man. To his Guardian. Barny went home to his father every day at 3.30 on the dot, and sat with him on the couch and watched TV and fetched his poison from the fridge. And as the years passed and Barny’s legs lengthened and his dad’s gut grew, Barny loved him until he crawled out of the hole and into the sun.

  I had the first inkling the day he told me all this that giants walked among us.

  So it was brave Barny’s suggestion to go to Blackwall Reach.

  And it was Nate who seconded it.

  He was with us in the foodhall. He stood so quickly his chair squealed on the tiles. “Yeah,” was all he said, and I heard him stuffing his things back into his bag.

  “Nate,” I said, “There’s no way my parents, or yours for that matter, are gunna buy that.”

  “We’ll go tonight,” he said. He was standing now. There was a finality in his voice that sent a shiver down my spine.

  Why the fuss about Blackwall Reach? Well, for that we need to go back a little further than that day in August, to January of the same year.

  But first let me set the scene.

  Come with me. Shut your eyes for a moment. Turn out the lights if you can, and let even the after image fade.

  Black, right? Empty? Think you’re going cross-cultural with a blind man?

  You’re not even close.

  Forgive me. I was being a little insincere when I said ‘come with me’. You see, you can’t.

  But go ahead and picture as best you can the inner world of the man for whom the photon has been forever banished. This is immediate living. No time lag here. No awaiting that neural zap of the universe’s synaptic pathways to carry the sensory payload to your brain. No Neo-Kanto-Einsteinian phenomenological distance here: The thing beheld is the thing. It is the desert of the now.

  People often ask me what a blind person sees. If I’m in a surly mood, I’ll say floral wallpaper themed sub-cranial pink. Otherwise, I’ll explain that it’s different for everyone. Some get fireworks, some get phantoms. Me, I get jet black. Once in a blue moon, and for no reason I can discern, I’ll get sable. But uniform, liquid jet velvet has been the order of the day for as long as I remember.

  Now imagine on that January day, as a freak summer storm raged outside my window, how it felt to see that first glimmer. It came while I lay on my bed, the faintest flicker of light. There and gone in the same breath.

  Was I dreaming? Had my mind torn this ember of memory from my primordial past?

  Perhaps I was having an aneurism.

  I waited to die, and when I didn’t, I fell asleep and forgot the episode altogether.

  But it was not altogether. Because I remembered, sure enough, when it happened again, and this time with a searing clarity by contrast. The second time it flared into being in the vault of my mind as I lay in bed, smelling the frangipani through the window. I’d tossed and turned on my sheets, and now was well and truly into turning and tossing. I had no idea how late it was, as my sweat-slicked fingers on the talky clock’s button had yielded only a drunken buzz.

  In that melancholy moment a visitor entered my world and drew aside the curtain on a bonfire-blaze of a face. It was all fuzzy, smudges of dark and light, but it was a face, I was sure of it. A woman’s face.

  Over the next days and weeks the visions came again and again, with growing clarity. Sometimes they would begin as a faint haze, snowy static in blackness. Other times they would slam into my head with a force that shocked my balance. But all the time, after those first few, they came with such detail, such presence, I could have reached out my hands and felt. I was seeing, but it was someone else’s world; It was stolen vision.

  These images were disjointed mostly. Wooden bars. Wind billowing gauze curtains. Goldfish gobbling at fingers. And the woman. More than once I must have looked a fool, standing in the school hall, my hand outstretched mutely to trace the crows feet beside her thick lashes and the contour of her cheek bone.

  As I said, these visions—memories, I’ll call them—were disjointed in time. I knew this after the sudden appearance of a man. One day he bundled into my thoughts clean shaven and blowing raspberries on my stomach. The next, he wore an inch of black-grey mottled beard, and the skin beneath his eyes had pouched and gone dull grey. But his eyes still smiled.

  I didn’t tell Barny about my ’vision’ until well after we’d moved to Bungaree Special School. The move had been ‘to a more appropriate learning environment,’ which was short for Mrs Yates had gotten fed up writing twin syllabi for her year 8s—normal and other. It was my fault. I’d failed to assume an appropriately remorseful demeanour following an incident of culpable boredom. Barny came with me without a fuss, but I didn’t tell him right away. Not that I didn’t trust him. But I—we—had only just become happy, faceless amoeba, and I was loathe to rattle the petri dish so early on. I had just for the first time in memory been stamped ‘normal’. I wasn’t keen to go freak-squared so soon after.

  But tell him I did, and Barny, in characteristic fashion, just silently soaked it up and gave me a pat on the back. Then my deaf friend said those words that spring to life every so often and ricochet around inside my head to this day: “I’ve been hearing.”

  We sat there and I don’t remember hearing anything but his voice until the end-of-lunch siren rang. He told me how these sounds had intruded first as a low thump thump that had sent him scrambling onto his knees in the middle of the night. He thought he was dying. I believed him too. He sniffled it out to me and I could feel him shaking as he recalled it.

  So you can guess what the topic of conversation was pretty much for every moment we were alone together from then on. There was no draining this cistern. Imagine it!

  That’s how we were the day Nate came. Barny was saying, again with tears, “Paahlie. Last night my ears travelled to a symphony. A symphony!” He struck my shoulder in faux outrage. “Why didn’t you tell me that something invisible could be so beautiful?”

  I had no reply. And neither did I hear the newcomer, Nate, approach through the leaf litter beneath the oak at the far angle of the playground. Because Barny had just derailed my train of thought and sent it crashing into icy water.

  I had been to the symphony too. The previous night as I lay on bed and gave full attention to my stolen sight. My eyes had drunk in rows of flashing, duelling violin bows, fingers flickering along slender flutes, and the mad gesticulations of the conductor—a magician with fly-away hair whose wand brought to life the chimeric beast before him.

  Barny had heard a symphony; I had seen one.

  It was a coincidence that stretched credulity.

  And when I cast my mind back to examine each conversation since Barny’s confession of hearing, every instance of stolen vision and sound, I discovered they fit, tooth to ward, like a key in a mile-long lock. For a month Barny had been hearing what I was seeing.

  In hindsight it was so obvious. But what did it mean?

  A nudge from Barny finally alerted me to the arrival of Nate, who for some inscrutable reason, had picked us to make his first introduction. And it took me no time to sense that Nate was not like any other student at Bungaree Special School.

  I said Barny was a giant, and he was, God rest his soul. But Nate—Nate was a dragon, or a genie, or a fey elemental. I just didn’t know it at the time.

  He wasn’t one to talk about why he was at Bungaree. Most of the other kids were happy to. We did it with a cathartic rush, similar I imagine to the confessions of an AA meeting. Not that we accepted the world’s labels, mostly. In talking there came understanding, pride even. But Nate was different.

  My first impression of Nate was strengthened by the attention he attracted from the visiting medicos. He was forever joining us at break time surrounded by the cloying odour of the infirmary, almost as though he were a specimen they unbottled, shocked into life, and sent shambling into lunch and recess
to observe the customs of the living.

  So, I guess, they poked and prodded him. And then there was the media on occasion, who poked and prodded him in their own way. Perth, Western Australia, was a small place—the end of the world, really. When there wasn’t something as galaxy shaking as a football hero running from a booze bus or a model’s pants falling off (imagine the apoplexy if it had been the football hero whose pants had fallen off), there was always the ‘Unfeeling Boy’ to fallback on. ‘Case follow-up’ they called it. Serialised reality soap opera way before its time.

  But we didn’t bug Nate about it. I think we were kinder than your average twelve year olds, and perhaps that’s why he had come to Bungaree in the first place. It had been his decision. When you’re the only known case of a medical condition in the world, I guess being surrounded by others of some condition at all, regardless of the ilk, rendered living more tolerable.