By Benjamin Lo

Carol had the dream where she was pushed out of the window again. She would be gazing out of its frame at something in the gaussian blur of the blue sky when a playful shove would topple her over the window's edge.

As her body rolled over head-first, she would see that the window simply floated in the vault of the sky, its curtains billowing lazily, waving farewell. Then came the plunge. It was slow. Like a dollop of honey dripping from a honey dipper. Her hair would ripple around her in seaweed slowness, tips undulating groggily as the window retreated. There was no wind rushing against her though. The sun, wherever it was, shone heatless rays and the clouds sluggishly parting around her body never planted any dampness on her skin. The best way to describe it was that she was falling through a painting.

This time, when Carol awoke, she did so when the window was about the size of her pinky nail. It was an all-time record. Feeling the suffocating warmth encasing her, she rolled out of her bed, careful to avoid crashing into the stacks of notes slouching on her desk making sense of social deviance. She then stalked over to her dresser and hunted for her flask of water in the dark. The water was still at an affable warmth, and she downed it in steady glugs. Somehow, it cooled her down, dissolving the heat's perverse grip.

Turning to her room's windows, Carol observed the July sky behind their condominium block. It was beginning to awaken in a cool glow that would soon be overtaken by ceaseless mugginess. The world was supposed to end in five months when 2012 dawned, yet it seemed so indifferent. The sky always looked the same in Singapore, unbothered about its obstinance. Carol wondered why she was always wearing a sleeveless summer dress in the dream. She had never owned one, nor worn one in her life, even though she sweated a bucket a day.

After washing up, Carol prepared a breakfast of milky earl grey tea and a fried spam sandwich stuffed with scrambled eggs for Owen before heading for his room. The moment she opened his door, he leapt out of bed, feet barely settling on the floor before he hastened to the bathroom.

By the time the leftover fried rice from last night's shift had nearly finished reheating, Owen had pattered to the kitchen, school uniform crisp and hair suavely combed back. Snatching the sandwich from the countertop, he then chowed down as he whipped his phone out.  

"You're going to have to get your own dinner. I'm working late again after my lectures," Carol said as the microwave dinged and she retrieved her breakfast.

"Yah," he murmured through squelchy chews, tapping at something on his phone. His other hand twisted and screwed the sandwich into his mouth. Once he was done downing his tea, he then patted his chest thickly before taking his dishes to the sink, the hiss of the tap following after.

"Just leave it. I'll wash it." Carol forced a bolus of greasy rice down her dry throat.

"Nuh-uh." Owen scrubbed away meticulously, foam frothing from between his fingers. Shaking her head, Carol focused on chewing apart the few dried clumps of rice she had introduced to her mouth. This sprig of independence that had arisen in Owen should have assuaged some stress. The chores were getting done faster while their parents galivanted across the globe once again. But it made her fret more. Independence meant defiance, a crack in the order of things. Her brother had always been diligent, but always within the insulated realm of his own business. However, that conscientiousness had been leaking from that once believed impermeable bubble since the end of Term 1.

She wondered if Owen had found someone he fancied in school. Infatuation was the catalyst for many of life's reformations. Could he even have the capacity to tell someone he liked them? He wasn't exactly the most direct with words unless speaking about buildings and architecture. The last she remembered getting a hug from him was a decade ago when she had carried his sullen seven-year-old body home on her back in the aftermath of a cramp. An obligation to tease and gently clue him in on his flaws to prepare him for the worst floated about. The last thing she wanted was to be lodging with a heartbroken teenager.

"I'll buy back some breakfast when I get back from school." Owen's voice startled her and she turned to see him leaning against their front door, sliding a shoe horn out of his shoes before depositing it back behind the shoe rack. "Chicken or char siew bao?"

"Anything."

"Chicken then." Owen wrenched the door handle, jerked it open and nodded. "See you."

"You too." Carol waved as Owen closed the door silently. As she glanced at his polished dishes on the drying rack, her pale plate, recently crusted over with grease, stared accusingly at her. Shame suddenly admonished her readiness to accept the rejection of her brother as a forgone conclusion. Who knew. Maybe the mystery girl liked silent workers. It was all a fantasy anyhow; Carol had no intuition for romance. Nor the time. Forcing the rest of the rice down, she then began washing the oily sclera of her plate.

"Got the dream again?" Tien's breathy voice settled in Carol's ears like dandruff. Fishing a glass from under the counter, Carol wiped the sweat around her lips before pressing them into a flat line, then scooped some ice into the glass. The café was thankfully devoid of the usual night crowd. If not, her fellow waitress would not have been blabbing so openly.

"I fell further this time," Carol stated as she poured teh from a pitcher into the glass before stirring some condensed milk in. Tien nodded, eyes turning to slits as if she could finally decipher anything unlike the other attempts over the past few months.

"You ate the leftover rice for supper," Tien said, raising a finger.

"No. I ate it for breakfast today." Carol clipped off to deliver the teh to its master, a thin faced man with the body of a beanbag. Lips instinctively swelling into a smile, she trilled the order like a question. She felt the man's yellow smile smear its smarm over her and resisted the urge to deflate her own grin till she had turned away.

Upon Carol's return to the counter, Tien declared, "It was that guy who came right? From your module. Buff dude who kept trying to call you over for orders."

"He's just a classmate."

"Then it was Prof Jansen's consultation. That fucking essay was really unfair –"

"It's just a dream Tien." Carol feigned an amused chortle. "Not everything has to have meaning."

"You don't know that Freudian shit? Dreams have meaning one. Should have studied psychology man. You could be psycho analysing yourself for free." Tien clicked her tongue, stretching her hands behind her back. "Then you can catch that damn creeper shoving you." 

Carol simply nodded her head in response. Even before her dream's increased frequency, she had always wanted to turn around and see the face of her pusher. Yet, no matter how she willed it, a paralysis always locked her hands on the sill, eyes refusing abandon the soft frills of the clouds. Perhaps it was her deepest, most intrinsic resignation to the inevitability of the soft palms laying on her back, their momentary contact leaving imagined pads of warmth beneath her deltoids. It was like she wanted it. It was not something she could tell Tien; on an instinctual level, she felt she could not tell anyone for some reason.

The door jingled and in sauntered a fresh batch of sweaty booze-red faces. Carol snatched the chance to stride away from Tien's searching voice and the sticky presumption that she wanted anything solved. It was better this way. To continue the steady ho-hum of waking, going for lectures, eating, studying for her degree, sprucing the house up and, if it was her shift, waiting on students, creeps, jerks, uncles and workers trying to detoxify their alcoholic blood with sugar and caffeine. With such a crawl of chores, there was assurance that the trail for this leg of her life was paved. That no inapt move would send her spiralling into limbo like the pit of sky in restless dreams sucking her down interminably. The only destiny there was forever blue, gradually further from the purchase of the window of a room she had never seen.

The pneumatic doors of the bus stumbled back on their hinges as Carol watched a couple in matching baggy shirts quite literally twirl into the darkness beyond. Her eyes lingered, uncertain of when they had gone astray, before trailing back to her notes like lost ants to their pheromone trail. The words carved by her pen earlier in the day about social control theory indented subsequent pages. They left little uneven ridges atop the trails of blue next to the columns of intricate doodles of faces and cuddly critters. A heaviness immediately rolled across her brain, dampening her comprehension of the letters lining the shelves of the foolscap.

"Let me see your notes tomorrow," Carol murmured to Tien who lounged beside her, playing Plants vs Zombies on her phone. "I think I missed something about informal deviance."

Tien grunted, then clicked her tongue. Belying her indecorous manner lay a rather seasoned essay writer. Half of the time, Carol believed she had passed her essays only because of Tien's threadbare scrawls that uncannily distilled all important information.

Studying sociology was not a passion. It was neither Carol's second nor last choice either, but what had seemed necessary after honestly evaluating the long list of dislikes and pitfalls she had drawn based on her dream jobs. Graphic design was too saturated. And nobody would read art theory. Delving into the gooey relationships amalgamating society seemed safer, more clandestine. A path that offered more options for the future, whatever it would come to. It was the responsible decision.

Carol's phone vibrated and she found a text from Owen, confirming that he had secured tomorrow's breakfast in the fridge and had finished folding yesterday's laundry. An approving sound arose from Tien. She was stretching her head over while her thumb collected sun for her plants.

"My bro just lepak at home. Don't study but his marks aren't shit. At least yours helps with the chores."

"Maybe until our parents come back," Carol mumbled as she pocketed her phone, turning a page in her notes.

"Where they now?" Tien stifled a yawn as she fell away.

"Malta. I think."

"Chey. That Italy?" She gulped down the final word as her yawn slid abruptly down her throat.

"Close. I think they're their own country." The switch of subject to her parents reminded Carol of their peripheral existence since commencing their big European tour. It had been accepted as routine on some day long ago that the domain of rearing children was one their parents had a ghostly clutch on. Carol couldn't remember a time she had been scolded for a bad grade or heard the whistle of a cane through the air. Her destiny was hers to command, and by some force of fortune, her juvenile self had the innate sense to study and work instead of groping mindlessly through the void of unvoiced expectations.

The moment Carol had completed her A-levels, her parents had begun sliding trips into the order of things, extracting themselves further from the realm of housekeeping. It had been thrilling to have the burden of responsibility thrust on her, to colour her everyday actions with greater meaning. All roads led to caring for the wellbeing of the family's material and emotional property; Owen, most principally. That was how life had proceeded for the past two years, and the vestiges of that purposeful load had yet to lighten.

There had only been occasional calls from the mystical parents on Viber, the latest from a layover at Frankfurt. Only a smatter of texts asking about their children's wellbeing and small deposits into her bank account indicated they had not run out of their lives. The rest of the messages were updates on little hole in the wall eateries, seaside towns, friendly accents, churches, beer, wine and ruins. Based on their latest text, they would head to Norway tomorrow after they had seen the Blue Lagoon, and their reverie would continue to leave her and Owen out till the end of the month, with souvenirs and treats to caulk the void of their absence following.

"You wanna get off here?" Tien pointed her thumb at a window, turning her phone off. "There's a good bar around the bus stop."

"I've got things to prepare."

"Just one drink. Come on. You've earned it."

"I've got things to prepare," Carol said brusquely, before hastily adding, "It's not that I don't want to. I'll hang out with you someday. I promise. Just now isn't the time."

"Well, my heart will wait for you then, dear girl." Tien exaggeratedly pouted her lips, kissing the air, before laughing. "Chill. Not smart of me to ask. Sorry. But the first thing we'll do is get you some new clothes. When did you last buy clothes?"

"Before year one."

"Fuck. Well, a dress will look good on you."

"I'll check my budget."

The bus pulled up by the familiar road to her condominium. Carol hastily bade Tien goodbye before grabbing her things and heading back home through a wall of heat. She found Owen sitting at the dining table under a cone of harsh light, the fan turned to maximum speed. He scribbled away at something amidst the cityscape of foolscap, stationary, notes and a graphic calculator, occasionally pausing to tap the puckers on his brow with his pen.

"How was your day?" Carol called, slipping her shoes off with the backs of her heels.

"Good." Owen turned to her, nodding, then dove right back to his work. Knowing that was the best she would get, Carol ambled to the kitchen for some iced chamomile tea before plonking herself across Owen. Drumming the rim of her cup, she observed her brother's methodical rhythm; the steady tap of buttons across the calculator, the smooth swirling of pen on paper punctuated by the clicking of the ballpoint and the heavy pauses accompanied by low breaths. To have so much under control, such economy of interaction, uncomplicated by anything, made Carol feel a sisterly urge of protection for Owen. He was in paradise and was unaware of it.

Of course, an outsider looking in on the scene might have had doubts. A silent condominium managed by two young'uns (one about to take his A-levels), parents almost perpetually across the continents? The eldest child, balancing book and dough, in charge of all household affairs from the bills to allowances? What a sorry state!       

The cries of injustice from some of her sociology friends who were eventually clued in on Carol's lifestyle were not uncommon; Tien, thankfully, didn't bat an eye. It was odd to see their moral indignation, for this was all normal to her, or, what those same dispensers of virtue declared, her idea of normal. She was a victim of some nebulous force out there that shaped her parents' loose control of her upbringing, and it was unfair, perhaps abusive to have left a child in a vacuum without guidance. Finding evidence to make everyone of anywhere a victim seemed the root sociology in Carol's mind, yet she always found pause in that.

Across her studies, as the veil of the invisible hands binding her with strangers continents apart gradually peeled away, Carol often pondered about those who stood in the epicentre of events she saw in the news, and their families only a blink away from the shockwaves. Getting cleaved in half by a falling pane of glass, writing a mistaken comma in a treaty that could displace millions, bearing the sting of intimate betrayal – a profound pity arose when she thought of those people. Those were the true sufferers of the world. Would these victims of causality ever remember what normal was like someday?

She had become dully aware that she felt shielded from those kinds of uprooting events simply because she lived her normal life, an invincible cheat code that would make any nemesis bounce off ineffectually. Believing that her dream – as she supposed Tien was trying to do—was one of the many bristles of the comb grand disasters strummed on in boredom, was plainly self-aggrandizing. Not that she believed there was something selfish in being a victim of circumstance. Not at all. It was simply that conflating a dream of all things with the mere aspect of actual disaster seemed to demean the struggles of actual sufferers.

And so, what was there to complain? To let her brother continue his peaceful existence, working towards that architecture degree, she had to carry on the path already laid—a conveniently laid one at that. Wiping her brow, Carol decided that she would not let Owen buy breakfast for the rest of the week. He had other things to fret about more important than what he had to eat the next day.  

"Do you think it's getting warmer these days?" Carol eventually asked, sipping her tea.

"The sun isn't going to explode. Don't worry. The world isn't going to end." Owen's flat voice made Carol raise an eyebrow.  

"Where did that come from?"

"You groan in your sleep. Walls are thin," Owen reported, expression unreadable.

Frowning, Carol shifted upright, almost dragging her cup off the table. "What do I say?"

"That you're warm. You're going to burn. All sorts of terrible things about the world being fucked."

Carol almost blurted out that she did not dream of those things. Not once did she recall speaking during her falls. She managed to catch herself, instead rolling out more measuredly, "I don't think I would say the world is getting fucked in my sleep."

"You might as well have said that," Owen breathed, shrugging slightly before delving back into the protection of his quadratic equations. "You go rest. I'll get the laundry later."

Carol lingered, staring at him, before getting up to wash her cup and head to bed. When she eventually got around to lying down, she imagined what lay in the room she never saw. Maybe she had never looked out of the window to admire the sky. Maybe she had always been trying to avoid what was behind her. Watching the light from under her door vanish and the rumble of the washing machine shake the air, she shut her eyes. She decided that if she fell that night, she would try to remember what she was doing before looking out to the sky.

The first time the dream had introduced itself was after her parents had come back from their first solo trip. It had been a week of dealing with the forefront of things she had never known had been taken for granted: meals, absent dust bunnies, mail on the table – the litany of blessings went on. And so, the night when she could finally rest her head on a pillow without having to worry about the washing was a welcome one; she had done a good job in preserving the household, and a good night's kip was a welcome wonder.

She had been pleasantly aware that she was dreaming, and it was a rather pretty dream at that. There was an inexorable bliss that intoxicated her, staring into the infinite sky. She never considered turning around to see where she was. All that mattered was what lay ahead, the boundless possibility before her. That was until she was shoved headfirst into it. She did not gasp, but felt the shock all the same. And when she noticed that she had been simply looking out from a window frame, the floor nowhere in sight, she was more confused than horrified. That was why she had always called her fall a dream, never a nightmare.

As Carol gazed at the intangible sky once again on the night she vowed to remember the room, there was a dim awareness of a revelation she had pocketed somewhere in a fold of her brain. It wasn't the fall that was the scariest, but that teasing attitude told through the push. As hard as she tried, she could never call the hands a tormentor. There was simply no malice to pin. How could anyone so mirthfully shove another out of a window? There was no cause and effect in her mind. Something so beyond understanding could not be confronted. And so, yet again, she plunged.

Awakening, Carol arose and shut her eyes. Friday greeted her with an armada of dark clouds and she began setting the morning in order. The baos Owen had bought were the palm sized ones, exactly the way she liked them, but the microwave soon turned their cores into some indistinguishable gingery mush. Owen didn't seem to mind though and typed away at his phone at the dining table.

Carol did not dare ask Owen if she had screamed anything last night. The answer appeared obvious, but having it verbalised by him would have loosened the grasp of the hand that held her life; even more than it had already by the repetitive invasion of the dream. And so, after some perfunctory farewells and washing all their dishes, Carol made her way to class. For once, the sun did not scorch her and a rare breeze escorted her to her bus.

She found Tien lounging near the front row of the lecture hall, drumming her pencil to some ditty in her head. A few pages of notes were slid to Carol the moment she sat down, and Tien broke into some prattle about a song her brother had played that he would not tell her the name of. Unpacking her stationery, Carol let the words noodle around her mind, before she tried to find the information she had missed transcribing in her notes – which had conveniently been circled with a little "you're welcome" signed below in glittery pen. Tien's foresight gave Carol pause.

Who was Tien? She was the one who went out of her way to plop herself next to her during the first lecture of the term. She was the one who never made her guilty for never initiating conversations. She had recommended the waitressing job, even delivered a hearty list of her virtues to the manager. By all means, Tien was beyond friendly – so open you could see her neurons firing before she even knew they were coming. That didn't mean she was dumb. That was partly why, Carol began to realise, she had told her about her falls through the sky. Yet, there was a niggling regret about confiding in her about the dream. Carol wondered why she even did so in the first place. To stop the dream? To find a second opinion that could uncover her secret shover? And if she saw their face, then what? The idea had a shaky circumstantial bond to the dream ending. The last thing she wanted was to submit to the whim of fate. It was irresponsible.

Steadily, her pen mimicked the letters she had missed on her own notes. It wasn't like she didn't trust Tien; it wasn't her fault. Now she just felt guilty, loading bodings of the apocalypse onto a helpful person's back. Especially when she herself couldn't solve them on her own. With a heavy stroke, she finished her note-taking. She then read over Tien's words in her handwriting, the guilt crawling more palpably over her. Just a few scrawls and she hadn't noted them down! She had never been good at noticing the small things. Perhaps it was a side effect of her mind perpetually finding the steadiest path to traverse. Airy steps looking up, not tiptoes gazing down!

No time for karaoke or Sentosa after her O-levels; she had to pick Owen up from school and grab dinner along the way. No time to finish up that panoramic drawing of the neighbourhood in time for the competition her teacher had egged her to join; her chemistry marks would finish her before that. No time for a little outing with that buff classmate to that popular café after the lecture (just the two of us of course); tables had to be waited, and money tightly saved up.

Glancing down, she noticed her notes were gone. At some point, Tien had slipped them away and was pawing through them. Before Carol could ask for them back, Tien plopped them back onto her table, declaring, "Ah, hallo—You wrote it! See, you just phrased it different." she clicked her tongue wetly and lightly tapped the incriminating lines on Carol's notes. Sure enough, she was right.

Carol sat still, then leaned forward, resting her head in her arms while Tien rambled on about something. She pinched her brow, letting out a sigh. "What do you think?"

"Well, sometimes you just write things differently when you're tired, yeah?"

"Um, no. If I ever figure out what the dream means."

A pause, then Tien patted her head, like how a granny stroked their aging pooch. "Then it'll be great for you." Tien nodded her head, then crossed her legs. "But if it means nothing, then man, what are you thinking to yourself without telling anyone? Still, that'll be anticlimactic as shit."

Hours later when Carol arrived home after her shift at the café, she instinctively sensed a seismic disturbance that pinched her throat. Owen sat hunched over his phone, hands clutching each side protectively as his lips furled. His notes lay splayed in the fortress of his arms, stationary swooning across the crinkled pages, forgotten. The muffled voice of a reporter sounded. Wordlessly, she walked behind him and peered at what he was observing on his phone.

Bodies lined the shore of an island, some bobbing about. Some sicko had shot up a summer camp in Oslo. Norway. There had been a big explosion before that too. In the capital. The footage cut to a burnt-out building, windows blown out, rubble and debris strewn throughout lingering wisps of dust and pulverised plaster.

The time it took for Carol to coalesce the connection was fractional.

There was an airport at Oslo, right? Was that the main one everyone alighted at? What time had mom and dad said they would alight? Were they taking a bus to the hotel? Did the bus trundle by that husk of a building? Was there going to be another assault? Why hadn't she checked the news earlier? There was too little information. Her life had selfishly made a dramatic volte-face some time ago and had failed to clue her in during the lead-up, and the resulting avalanche blotted out everything except Owen's back.

A new infinity bloomed from Carol's mind, projected onto her brother's form in a spiral of tentative futures and ruminations on those futures. What would become of them? What were they now, possibly, at this moment? Another dearly beloved for the growing list of victims? Another rank in the invisible people across the world? She shouldn't have, but her mind whirled to the dream.

Freefall? Was that what it had been foretelling? The future was endless tumbling, no purchase in sight. Now Owen would join her, seeing that the security of his world had never been there in the first place. It felt wrong. Her body felt immeasurably tight, squeezing all the blood till it swelled in her head. This was it. It had finally arrived. It was the end of the world.

Her broodings would have continued spinning, expanding like psychedelic blots on a kaleidoscope, if not for Owen's voice shattering the silence.  

"They'll call," Owen stated, a ferocious certainty in his flat tone.

That was all it took for her lurching organs to slide back into place. Under Owen's stoic figure, Carol saw the fear, cold, climbing between his flesh and muscles. The defiance towards the possibility of disaster. There was no time for self-pitying guilt at not being the one to assure her brother.

"I'll try getting to them," Carol murmured, digging out her phone. She retreated to her room to ransack her desk, trying to find the post it notes where she had written down the details of where their parents had been planning to stay.

And of all the chance timings, a buzz erupted in her hand. A call. "MOM" in bold letters.

Instantly jabbing the answer button, Carol whipped the phone to her ear. Their mother's voice seemed fraught with pitch anxiety. Words were babbled in a stream of consciousness, leaving Carol unable to get a word in. Their mother asked if she wanted to speak to their father. Carol said something and their father's gruff mumblings pattered into her ears. Nods were all she could give in response to his grousing. With a note of finality and a few faint words from their mother from the periphery of somewhere, the call ended.

They would be coming back early. Carol sagged onto her bed, throwing her phone aside before rubbing her temples. Shoulders sinking till her elbows dug sorely into her thighs, she allowed the pain to dissolve her tumble of worries into nothing.

If. The power of that word trembled like a stricken triangle, whining in the channels of her ears. If they had arrived a day earlier. If they had decided to do some sightseeing near the prime minister's office.

Shaking her head, Carol sighed, a new ephemeral weight joining what crouched on her shoulders. All those teenagers. Gone. She had never known they had existed, yet the thinnest thread of her parents' holiday that wound her to them still felt like irons clasping her heart. They somehow solidified beyond the growing number of the body count. They had become silhouettes cast by souls she could never see. Always behind, warmth just a turn of the head away. She already knew that, try as she might, she would never see them. 

The rules of the world flickered like bars on an ancient CRT television screen. The touch of catastrophe had brushed by, the prophesised meteorite obliterating earth only grazing the planet's gravitational field. Still, she felt as if she had already died. She had done nothing, but disaster had slipped its fingers through grills of her house, almost inviting her parents along. And she knew she could not have done anything to stop it. Helplessness. This was the curse of knowledge – of her normal life's mortality.

She still had to tell Owen. Immediately, she realised she should have called him over the moment her mother's voice burst into her ear. But that was too late to regret. Getting up, she loped out of her room to him, desperate to inform him of their parent's return.

Saturday dawned with clouds cushioning the sun. The first message a bleary Carol received was from her parents; they would be back late that very night. It was unsurprising, and decoding the motives that had spurred this action was not challenging. They were Lapsi who had awakened to the generous gift of family, ready to make amends; but never verbalising the sins they had committed, hoping their renewed actions would be enough to redeem them. That was a singularly annoying thought, in spite of the maelstrom last night. 

The next few messages she received as she prepared breakfast were a long line of rapid-fire texts from Tien, asking in undisguised concern about her parents and the Oslo shooter, accompanied by thickets of exclamation and question marks. Carol couldn't help but feel touched by her friend's concern, and asked if she could meet with her sometime tomorrow if her Sunday wasn't booked, assuring her she was just peachy. 

After breakfast, Carol's first order of business was bringing Owen out shopping with her. There was no resistance from him despite his trove of work, as if he understood something important about the need to go shopping together. Their stop was a nearby mall, bustling with foreign workers and families, and their first task was buying the groceries for dinner. A sudden return demanded a feast, and their parents surely needed one to cure their soreness of missing out on Norway's cuisine.

"You think they'd want sausages?" Owen asked as Carol peered at a meat freezer.  Their basket was loaded with food they could easily fry, boil and microwave; chips, beans, instant mash, carrots, peas – the mess went on.

"It's western. And we just need to fry them a bit. If they want something local, we can just buy some satay."

"I can do sausages." Owen tilted his head. And so they settled for a hodgepodge of bangers and mash, some chicken soup, beans, otah from their nearby hawker centre and some fruit. But Carol wasn't done. 

For the next 40 minutes, Owen was shuttled across an assortment of clothing stores as Carol perused their dress selections. Perturbed was an understatement for Owen's mental state, as he observed her peer at and feel the dresses that caught her eye, looking at the price tags before turning heel and sauntering out of the stores. First the splurging on food, now this. He wondered if the false alarm had shocked the stiff out of her. Certainly not all of it, seeing she clearly had some budget in mind for her purchase. It was plainly ridiculous; they were not tight on money. After all, their parents padded their living allowance for things they liked, which Carol squirrelled away with the rest of the cash for their necessities.

Finally, Carol found a pale summer dress that she tried on. As she threw the changing room curtain open, she asked Owen for his opinion, which made his mind turn to a blank. He did not want to critique his sister like he would with a building that caught his fancy. He could not say that she simply looked like a wispy cloud, ready to be blown away. And so, he simply said, "I don't know."

"Why?" Carol turned around to gaze at the changing room's mirror, trying to glimpse her back.

"You never wear them. Don't even have one."

"Doesn't mean I don't like them."

"It looks good." Owen shrugged in surrender.

"Then I'll take it." Carol swished the curtain close. Later, once the dress had been paid for and bagged, the two headed home. Owen insisted on carrying everything, but Carol ignored him and just made him bear some of the groceries. The two siblings took a bus back which was stuffed to the brim with chittering Filipinos enjoying their day off. Side by side, Carol found it hard to ignore Owen eying her intensely, so she met his gaze, asking, "Did I say something again last night?"

Owen paused then shook his head, saying, "You know they say it's around December 2012. Not when 2012 comes. The end of the world."

Carol nodded, then leaned back, hugging her purchases closer to her. "Owen, is there a girl you like?"

Furrowing his brow, Owen turned away, opened his mouth, then shut it pensively. He then murmured, "I don't know. Maybe."

"That's good. That's good." Carol shut her eyes. "She'll like you. Even if it's not now. Don't worry. Give it time. You're a good kid. One year, two years, keep in contact. Be a rock. You have plenty of time."

"Are you sure you're alright?"

"I didn't sleep too well last night. I'm taking a nap," Carol murmured, resting her head on her bags.

"I'll wake you up," Owen replied, letting out a sigh. By then, Carol had already drifted off, head melding into the heat between the bags' plastic folds. Directing the air conditioning vent above her towards her head, he watched its wheezy gusts lightly brush her hair. And Owen wondered if his sister ever dreamt about the world burning with such a silly smile all the time.

Soundlessly, the clouds sailed before her as she gripped the window sill. She counted down the moments till the hands would press against her back and launch her into the blue. It didn't come. She counted again, the curtains fluttering in the periphery of her vision. It didn't come.

A needle of fear twitched itself into her chest. That wasn't supposed to happen. Her fingers released the window sill, and dreamily she tried to move her shoulders. They turned and along with it her vision. The curtains cut across her eyes briefly before she came to face the room behind her.

It was a simple room she recognised. Her room, but not hers presently. Instead of the lecture notes on the table, there were neat binders of drawings next to a drawing tablet. Lying on the stool by her dresser were a myriad of summer dresses that were far too small for her. On her bed lay a clothes hanger atop a plump duvet, the cushions neatly fluffed like freshly baked bread loaves. And, of course, there was a door exactly where it should be like in the living world. Except it was ajar. It seemed to be inviting her over, purposeful in its teasing bar of light flickering between the door and frame.

In hindsight, it seemed obvious that this would be her room, although the window was completely different. Turning back, she saw that the sky sat below her, deep and indefinite. She considered closing the window, but then turned to the door. Walking over to it, she then pulled it open wider and stared out to the nothing before her. More purgatory. Yet, she took a chance and ambled on into it.

With every step, the lighter she became. Owen's voice was calling, louder and louder. She could feel herself fading back to the waking world. Where was she going? She wondered if she could reach the end. Whether the dream would end or it would reappear like a tired serial, there would always be next time, and she could always try again. Over and over, round and round. As long as she decided to do that. Or could. And that was fine.

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