By Clara Chow

"Tell me a story about fire," she said.

He thought for a second. They were sitting at a cafe, empty dishes on starched table cloth before them. They had known each other for more than 20 years; been friends for at least half that. Brunch had been delicious. A sated, sleepy calm descended upon them like a light curtain.

"The recycling bin at the foot of my block caught fire recently," he said. "My sister smelt something burning from 16 floors up. Sent me to investigate. By the time I found the source, someone had put the fire out. But the bin had melted. Its green plastic had fused to the blackened wall. It was horrible."

He picked up his phone then. She thought he was going to show her a photo of the bin; its fiery aftermath. But he was merely answering a text message that had just come in. In lieu of a photo, her brain supplied its own image: neon-lime-green stalactites climbing up the public housing block's walls like alien organs replicating. The charred receptacle misshapen – a monstrous foetus glowing with radioactivity, spreading fluorescent tendrils. It glittered in spots, gems embedded in its pulsing cave-like skin. The molten bin cooled into a life of its own, fantastical, in her head.

"There's this cat that liked to hang around the bin," he said. "My sister was worried and asked me to go down and look for it. To make sure it was okay."

She adjusted her mental picture, tuning it like rabbit-ear antennae atop a black-and-white TV set to pick up signals from outer space, to include this sister with the superhero sense of smell. A low melodic voice, a 1970s perm and svelte figure encased in pleated chiffon dress. She enlarged the frame to accommodate this facet of his personality, a fresh piece of the jigsaw puzzle. The idea of him as the obedient younger brother who did as the sister asked; who rode the lift down to the void deck and sleuthed, calling for the cat until it emerged from shadows, away from noxious fumes as the green recycling bin went up in flames. Away from gnarled plastic. Out of harm's way.

"What started the fire?" she asked.

"Somebody threw a cigarette butt inside," he said, miming the careless toss of a done smoker. Again, an image rose in her mind, of red pin-point glow of smouldering butt, tracing an arc in the dark after leaving its owner's hand. The precise landing on a pile of old school assessment papers. Thin curl of smoke as minuscule meteor bit into dry kindling, then crimson blaze and black flowers blooming. The beating heart of the flare buried within the junk discarded by the entire block's residents. Past desires and unwanted presents spitting, popping, crackling with resentment, burning long and hard enough to alter the configuration of stable molecules, to bring forth metamorphosis from solid to runny verdant liquid. To bring hard matter to its knees.

She thought: A dumpster fire is a beautiful thing. It laid bare all the secrets and flaws of the living on an uneventful evening. How many of us are masked under layers of things we need and want to discard – things we are dying to jettison in order to grow – but are afraid to? In a city chockfull of people living stacked on top of one another in dense urban housing, a base dumpster fire smokes the rare ones out of hiding. Growth is all around, waiting, like oxygen biding its time to catch a spark.

Once upon a time, a man searched for a cat near a burnt recycling bin sporting a terrible halo of extinguished flames – its own elemental crown of thorns. That moved her. Once upon a time, a new avenue opened up in an enchanted forest, in one's quest to understand another person.

"Is this what you wanted?" he asked. "Is this something you can write about?"

She nodded.

They paid the bill. She offered him a ride home. When they got to his estate, after a series of wrong turns and premature exits on the highway, he asked if she wanted to see the bin. 

"They took the melted one away very quickly and repainted the wall the very next day," he said. Somewhere in this relentless efficiency was a little tragedy. She mourned quickly the loss of the relic but welcomed the chance to be a pilgrim to the site of the fire.

Somewhere in the rapid white-washing of tiny, inconsequential human history, too, is a little metaphor. For the way we constantly paint and repaint the carefully-maintained walls of our assumptions. Replacing, re-angling, recycling our impressions of others; our relationships to them and to ourselves.

They got out of the car and made their way to his block. The substitute bin stood glinting, unabashed changeling, in a patch of late-afternoon sunlight. It was blue, colour-shifted from the emerald object of her romanticising and its past incarnation. Transmogrified by fire into another part of the light spectrum. It was identical to countless other recycling bins in this and other estates all over the island. She wouldn't be able to pick it out of a line-up. But there, at that moment, it was singular and spectacular. They stood before it, studying it and its place along the continuum of time. 

"Look," he pointed at the wall where a stark white rectangle stood out against the cream-dirt of its aged colouring. "You can still see the outline where the old bin stood."

They retreated under the void deck. He called and the cat came. A ginger stray with fresh scars on her back from a fight. Her slack belly swung as she padded towards him. 

"She's given birth before," she said, one mother recognising the loose skin of another. 

She watched as he bent and stroked the ginger. The cat swiped herself a couple of territorial times across his trousered shins. He reached into his tote bag and retrieved a clear plastic box. Tipped cat kibble from it onto the concrete for the cat. Ginger hoovered everything up.

"I didn't know you're the sort who carry cat food wherever you go," she said. 

"I have to," he said. "My sister makes me."

And again, sharper this time, with a name, she received an image of love. Transmitted across the galaxy on waves of unfathomable connection. Love is a clear plastic box with air-tight snap closures, rattling with hard brown tacks in a younger brother's bag. Love is the sound of a phone ringing as you pull into the carpark, the low answering murmur in Hainanese that you are home, that you are downstairs and will come right up.

So much is absent in this story: the fire, the one who put it out, a fire engine or long hose unspooling from the hydrant, the sister, the ending. The logic in saying that love is a dumpster fire. What is present: the sun beginning to set, burnishing the housing block golden-pink; a man petting an orange cat; a woman watching, thinking runaway thoughts.

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