By Natalie Wang

When I wake up, I am still thinking of the fluorescent-lit office with its plastic plants and cubicles where anyone can peer over at your shoulder, the Post-it's filled with my To Do tasks which never ever decrease no matter how much I work, and the layoffs everyone at work knows is coming, but which we all refuse to discuss with each other. So the first minute of waking up is pure confusion—because I am not only in a bed, which I have not slept in for a long time since I always end up doom scrolling on the sofa and fall asleep on the couch whenever I get home—but I am in my childhood bed, in my childhood room. The window overlooking the common corridor has the shutters closed. The ceiling light is on, casting its dim, warm yellow light around the room. The worn cotton bedsheets have ugly florals which I have always thought of as grandmotherly—my mother had bought them on sale at a pasar malam when I was in primary school and never replaced—but at this moment, the worn smoothness of it is comforting against my skin. The sun faded notes on the walls are still the ones I hung up when I was studying for my A-levels—charts on the human body, washi-taped Post-it's with all sorts of mnemonic devices so I could memorise chemistry and mathematical formulas that I proceeded to forget the moment the exams finished. I never had the heart to get rid of them even after I graduated from university, keeping them up like an apology to my past self's efforts and how little they mattered in the long run. 

Then the door opens, and my mother slowly shuffles in, carrying a large steaming bowl in her hands. I can't help but feel a twinge of guilt whenever I see her—especially since all my visits grew infrequent since I moved out. But now it's more like a slap to the face—when did she get this old? Her hair is now more white than it is grey, and she's lost so much weight she looks shrivelled and small when I always remember her as larger than life.

"Ah Mei, ah," she says, sounding like she always had. "I made zhou."

"Ma," I say, and my voice is all rusted up in my throat, a horrible scraping sound. She seems to tear a little at that—maybe I look as terrible as I sound. "Why am I here?"

"Aiya, Ah Mei, you were sick." She sits down on the bed with me and places the bowl of porridge at the bedside table. It's a single bed, but she is so tiny now I don't even have to wriggle to make room for her. "Your office called me, so I brought you home."

Again, the memory of the office, how choked out I felt staring at my computer screen, like I was going to start having some kind of panic attack. And weirdly now, cocooned in my childhood room, I feel oddly serene, as though the constant anxiety that had weighed me down in the last few years—

Can't quit job because need to pay mortgage for my new house, can't quit job so i can give Ma her allowance, can't quit job without any better job or else she won't be proud

—has been stripped away.

"Ma, I think I need to quit my job." I laugh, almost unable to believe that I have said those words aloud to her. "Unless they fired me already." Likely, since they never cared about not disturbing any employee on sick leave. At one point, it had been slightly more bearable when sick workers were allowed to work at home, but with a strong insistence that everyone needed to return to office, no matter the reason, the open office became an incubator of plague.

"It's okay," she says, and there's that odd sense of lightness again—that yes it is okay, that it really is okay. "You don't have to worry about that. Just eat and focus on getting well." She takes the bowl from the bedside table and cradles it in her lap, brings up a spoon to my mouth.

"I'm sorry." I have to seek forgiveness before I take in the benediction of her porridge. "I didn't want to disappoint you."

"Oh, Ah Mei." She puts the spoon back down to the bowl, and takes my hand. "I am sorry I always pushed you so hard."

I almost fall over in shock. Sorry is not a word she would ever use, directed at me. Cut fruit, my favourite home-cooked dishes, yes, but never ever sorry. I must have been really, really sick.

"Eat while it's still hot," she says, reaching for the spoon again, and I open my mouth obediently.

It is delicious. No sad do-it-yourself-in-one-hour-in-your-rice-cooker video recipe has ever been able to get this flavour. I chew on it slowly, can almost feel myself tearing up.

There's a soft little meow, and I open my eyes to see a cat walk into the room. It's a skinny thing, with dark grey fur and black stripes, and large yellow eyes that fix themselves on me in a way that is not entirely uncreepy, even though I know that cats like to stare.

"Since when did you have a cat, Ma?"

"Oh." She glances at it, but the cat still has its eyes on me. "The Ah Miaw came with me from the void deck."

I snort. "You call it Ah Miaw?"

She reaches again for a spoonful of porridge and I open my mouth without being asked.

Time passes like a dreamy haze. I stay in bed, nourished by my mother's cooking. It is such a far cry from the sad steady diet of food from Styrofoam boxes I have eaten for years, even if my taste and smell is muted like I recover from a cold. She makes porridge the way I love it—thick and creamy with rice and soy milk boiled on a stovetop for hours, filled with chopped pieces of century egg and thick chunks of pork, sprinkled on top with crispy, fried youtiao and spring onions. She brings carefully peeled apple slices and oranges and guava with sour plum powder sprinkled on the side, all arranged into fantastical floral shapes, and seems content with watching me eat, even though I urge her to have some as well. She never ever complains about my not doing the dishes, just tells me to rest well and get better. She never says she is sorry again, but she does not need to.

I catch up on years of sleep debt because even yawning seems to drain all the energy from me, but in the moments I am awake I reread the dusty pile of childhood paperbacks stacked behind the assessment books on my desk. I retreat to old fantasies—Narnia and Wonderland and the Faraway Tree. I thumb through my dog-eared copies of Russell Lee's True Ghost Stories and all the different stories—the drowned ghosts who pull down unsuspecting swimmers during Seventh Month, the suicide ghosts who wear bright red, the corpses who come banging back after the family fails to watch the coffin and a cat jumps over it in the middle of the night. It's like a holiday but deep down, I know it cannot last. The real world will always intrude.

"You can play the piano again," my mother says brightly one time when she comes in. Ah Miaw slinks in with her, never taking its big yellow eyes off me. I remember that it's a sign of affection that a cat follows and keeps you in its sight, but I'm still unnerved.

"Ma," I greet her and turn away from the cat. I set aside The Horse and His Boy guiltily, remembering how much she didn't like me wasting time with my books—"useless storybooks" she called them—once I was old and reading many books at a go was no longer an impressive skill.

My mother is still staring at me, as though she expected me to spring up from the bed and begin a mini-piano recital for her again, like the ones I did when younger.

"Oh." I try to laugh. "I've probably forgotten how to."

"Don't be silly, it will be like riding a bicycle." She can neither play the piano nor cycle, so I don't know how she can be so confident about their muscle memory. "You used to love the piano—remember how you would play for hours every day?  Maybe it will relax you."

"Only because you wanted me to play," I mumble. It has been more than 10 years since I'd sat down at the rickety bench and I would not be surprised if the insides of the secondhand Yamaha has been eaten away by mould or worse. I remember the canings if I did not do my two-hour daily practice. The slaps following any discordant notes, the books thrown across the room, the burning humiliation of picking them up. It had stopped once I got my Grade 8—a respectable enough certification I could put on my CV for university and scholarship applications—and then I could "focus on my studies." The piano then went the same way as all the books she'd happily bought me in primary school—gathering dust in a corner of the house.

"Don't be silly," she says. "You're remembering wrong." She frowns at the plate of cut fruit I'd left at my bedside to save for later, then picks it up and leaves the room before I can say anything. She turns the light off as she goes, and I am left in the dark, too exhausted to get out of bed to turn it back on.

My mother had placed a bell on my bedside table to ring for her help if I needed to go to the bathroom. I had noticed the empty patch above the sink from where the mirror used to hang the first time I went in, but the first time I showered, my hair came off my scalp by the handfuls when my mother tried to give me a head massage. I'd burst into hysterical tears at that point and needed to be gently guided back to bed. Given that, it is probably a good thing that she had thought to hide the mirror.

I can't hear her—she's probably taking a nap now, tired from looking after me. I can't bear to wake her after all I've put her through. I swing my feet out of the bed, determined to use the toilet without her help. I was strong enough to get up without feeling dizzy, the last time.

It is slow going, but I stagger to the door and open it. Shuffle my way to the bathroom just across the hall and collapse on the toilet seat just in time.

As I pee, I feel something fall out of me –something lumpy and wet. I assume it must be my period—I can't even remember what day it is, when I am due—and look down. Instead of the dark bloody streak I am expecting, it is a grey mass, and something—some things are wriggling.

I scream—the noise scrapes out of my throat like rusted metal, but it is loud enough. My mother clatters into the bathroom.

"Ah Mei? Ah Mei?" She bursts into the bathroom and sees me—then promptly slaps me across the face.

"What are you doing out of bed?"

"Ma, you need to call an ambulance!" I barely able to feel the burn of the slap through my panic. "There's something wrong with me."

"Of course there is—you're sick. Now clean yourself up and get back into bed."

"No! There's something really wrong."

"Don't raise your voice at me." She takes on the tone which immediately makes any protests my brain can muster shut down, so that the only small animal instinct left is to obey. "Get back to bed."

I listen, and when she exits my bedroom, I hear her lock it from the outside. The sound echoes in my head like a half-remembered childhood jingle.

I wonder where my phone is for the first time. If I'd fainted in the office, surely someone had thought to give it to my mother?

The details are fuzzy but I try to remember what she said I'd fallen sick with. Overwork and stress at the office, surely. Lack of sleep. Poor nutrition. Whatever plague had been spreading in the office, combined with my shitty immunity system. I had almost certainly been considered clinically depressed, but I hadn't bothered with therapy, since I hadn't had any time to attend it, and I knew no amount of therapy or medications were going to change my working conditions.

I wonder if any of my colleagues had bothered to visit or even sent a gift card. If I had been hospitalised—surely they would have called an ambulance before sending me back to my mother?—and if  so, where? And for how long? Wouldn't I have been conscious before they discharged me?

Didn't I have friends who cared about me? A boyfriend? Or had I been so holed up in my sad little office cubicle for so long that luxuries like friendship had long fallen away? That was so sad.

I can't remember. Why can't I remember?

My mother had said that this gap in my memory was caused by working too hard, when I was recovering. "Your brain overheated," she said. Did she mean I had meningitis? If I did, how was I just recovering here and not hooked up to a bunch of tubes? Did they need to operate?

I have to get my phone. I have to call someone, ask them what had happened. I need to be able to call a cab, have my credit cards on hand.

What had fallen out of me? What was I sick with? Why won't she tell me anything? Did she not understand anything the doctor had told her?

I ask her about it, as casually as I can, the next time she comes in with more food. 

Her face scrunches up. "I threw away your phone."

I cannot believe this. "What? Why?"

"It was making you sick," she says simply. "Every day—ring, ring, ring. No wonder you fell sick."

I make awful choking stuttering sounds. This is a worse betrayal than the time she read my diary, and then began to complain at me about all the things I had written about her.

"You had no right to do that," I finally say, the same thing I said back then.

"Don't be silly," she says and even though it's clear that she's trying, I hate the gentleness of that refrain. It used to be Don't be stupid. Useless. Rather have given birth to charsiew whenever she was angry. "I am your mother. I have every right."

But I'm not a teenager in your house anymore. You didn't pay for my phone, or my phone bills so that doesn't work. I'm an adult. You don't get to decide my life anymore!

I am heaving now, and I realise that I have said all the venomous things out loud in my raspy new voice. I look at her, expecting her to start screaming back at me, to slam the door and lock me in the room again, but she does none of these things.

"Money," she says simply. "You think now that things are different, because you make a lot of money? What is the point of the money if you work so hard you have no time to come and see your mother?"

"My money was what paid off the mortgage on this flat." Every word I croak out is a fight against both my aching throat and my rage. "My money is what let you retire."

"I never asked you to do that."

It's like being slapped again. I let out a scream, because there is nothing else I can do, and flop back into the bed and sob in frustration. It's like no time has passed since I was a teenager.

It's like some kind of door has broken down, and we can only fight now.

"Why is it you always have to stay up so late? You studied so hard last time so that you can get a good job."

"All good jobs need you to work long hours." I want to choke—how dare she lecture when, with how little of the world she knows. "Did you think I would just work a nine-to-five? Come home for dinner every day? Never OT?"

"Why not? Why couldn't you find a job like that?"

I begin to send my food back to her, untouched. She screams and cries about wasted food, tells me to eat up, but it seems to be the only way to get back at her. Nothing I say fazes her, not when I point out her hypocrisies, not when I shout at her. She only looks back at me, as still and unfathomable as the damned cat, and just locks me back into the room.

So I refuse to eat.

I don't touch the fruit or the endless bowls of porridge. I feel myself weaken, watch my hair fall off my head when I toss on the pillow. The skin on my hands seems to shrink. My legs, already weak from lack of movement, waste away some more. I begin to cough—an awful hacking sound that always seems to go on forever once I start.

She screams at me for my ingratitude, shouts at me for wasting her efforts, but I don't eat.

Another time I mouth off and say something she doesn't like and she brings up her hand to slap me again, but this time I am ready and catch her arm, clutching it tight.

She lets out a yowl of pain, as though I'd set her flesh on fire. I drop her arm, terrified, and then realise there is something wet on my fingers. I see the dark patches blooming on her sleeve where I had grabbed her.

"Ma?" I ask tentatively. She only whimpers, so I take her limp arm again and shove the sleeve of it up, to find her arm wrapped in bandages that were slowly spotting with blood. "Ma, what happened to you?"

"You cannot say that I am a bad mother," she whispers, her eyes filling with tears. "I have done my best."

I want to tell her that I know. She could only do what she could, a single mother who didn't even finish secondary school. I wanted to say that I knew that our stupid shitty piano didn't come free, that I remembered how she knocked on every neighbour's door until she found out who played the piano at odd times of the day and then asked for lessons in exchange for cleaning their house. I knew she had worked overtime, clocking in extra hours at work until we could afford a secondhand Yamaha but could never afford to get it tuned so the keys came out disconcertingly wrong and clangy every time I practised but I kept practising because she would hum off-key and ask me to play her songs. She was satisfied, just hearing me play scales and arpeggios over and over again, and would say she knew I was going to be an amazing piano player one day.

It is strange how fuzzy my present has become in this weakness but I can remember all these aching details of my past—our past together, as though her pain and pride has been carved into my brain.

But I think of the casual way she said that she'd thrown away my phone, and I hold on to that resentment the same way she cradles her bleeding arm to her chest.

It doesn't take long, but the room soon begins to fill with a terrible smell, and no wonder because it hasn't been aired in who knows how long. The windows have old-fashioned metal shutters, in trend back when the flat was still new in the 80s because the room's windows overlooked the common corridor and anyone passing by outside could look in. I take a closer look, trying to figure out if the lever has rusted down but then realise that they almost look like they've been welded shut. When I bang on them when I hear someone shuffle by, they only walk away. I still can't shout loudly enough through my broken throat to call for help coherently, can only croak out my cries. Doubtless, the neighbours just think my mother has lost it, and in true Singaporean fashion, have decided to not make it their problem.

That's when I decide that I need to go. It comes as a decision, a bright flare of purpose that cuts through the fog of my hunger and the weakness of my body.

It's like when I decided I needed to buy my own place. I'd depleted my savings on the downpayment for my studio, but I'd realised back then that my relationship with my mother was at its best when we had space. In university, she still expected me to come home each night even though I had wanted to stay in one of the school's hostels to know what it was like, even just for one year. My scholarship had paid for it, my part-time jobs giving tuition to O-level students also meant that I would be in Starbucks and McDonalds up until closing time so living closer to campus would have helped. It didn't matter to her. And when I started working she would continue to nag at me to eat better, to iron my clothes better, to ask why was she ironing my clothes for me when I was already so big, to ask why couldn't I help out more with the chores when she was already so old, and why was it I only wanted to laze in bed or on the sofa on weekends instead of going to the market with her or doing the dishes when the truth was that I was so exhausted I found that I couldn't do anything except dread the coming workday. At least there had been no one to nag me in my own space, even if it meant coming home to silence and dabaoed food every day.

When she next brings me food, I force myself to take a bite, knowing I will need my strength to escape, and then maybe bang on either a neighbour's door or even walk to a police station if no one will stop to help me call for the police. The porridge has gone watery, I realise, because she hadn't put in soymilk. There's a strong peppery taste to it that makes me want to sneeze, barely disguising the strong offal taste of the pork. Then I realise after a few minutes that I have finished everything. I estimate I had only gone without food for only two, at most three days—it is hard to tell, in this dark stuffy room with only the electric bulb for light.

"Good," she says. I cannot think of a spiteful enough reply, and just lie back down on the bed, silent.

When she leaves, I force myself out of the bed and begin pacing around the room. I can walk slowly, but it doesn't take long for me to tire, for the dizziness to take over. I notice how withered my legs are, and whimper. Force myself to continue.

It only takes another couple of days—at least I think it is a couple of days? But she stops locking the door to my room again, satisfied with my rediscovered obedience. She doesn't stroke the hair on my head, but instead sits in the corner of the bed again, watching me with her burning eyes, like she must make sure that I do not waste a single drop of food. The porridge continues to be thinner and less rich than before, as though she is punishing me for my earlier rebellion. She also doesn't speak to me, like she is stewing in her own venomous thoughts but wants to keep this fragile peace.

I want to wait until I think she is sleeping, but the one time I tried to venture out when things were silent and I figured she was asleep, I came out to find her lying on the couch in the living room, fast asleep, her head still turned to my door. It is a shock seeing her so still like that I almost go to check if she is dead, but then I notice her eyes open, gleaming at me.

"Go back to your room," she says. The cat uncurls itself from around her at her voice sound, and then also stares at me. It feels almost like I have been caught by two mothers, both waiting for me to confess my transgression.

"I need to use the toilet," I say. She gets up from the sofa and walks me to the bathroom, the cat following behind us both. Her shuffle is now more like a limp, I realise. She's also gotten thinner, more haggard, as though she is on her own hunger strike. She waits for me to finish, and then walks me back to my room. I wait to hear the turn of the lock, but again, thankfully, she doesn't lock me in.

So I have to wait for her be busy in the kitchen. She must be getting groceries from deliveries instead of going to the market herself, because I can't remember a single instance she has left the house since I woke up.

I try again when I hear her in the kitchen. She moves around so slowly and carefully now, as though her every movement causes her pain. I can hear her soft grunts whenever she shifts or sits, and wonder what is going on with her. For a moment, I wonder if it is cancer, if it means that I have to stay at home to look after her until she goes the way she has looked after me, but then I push that thought away. It can be dealt with once I get out and can figure out what is going on.

I open the door to my bedroom, just a crack. Yes, I can hear her moving around in the kitchen, and the yellowy light from it spills out enough into the living room so I can see the cat isn't there either. There's a strong offal smell which makes me want to gag, like pig intestines which haven't been cleaned. The shutters in the living room also seem to be bolted shut so there are only little slits of light coming in through the cracks.

I inch to the front door, and stop in shock. There isn't just the normal deadbolt she's used for years—it's filled with new padlocks and chains. She's gone absolutely mad.

I shove aside my panic. There have to be keys around.

I try the door to her bedroom instead, making sure through the kitchen door that her back is turned. Unlocked. It is dark, the heavy curtains drawn. It stinks here also, and her hoarding problem here seems to be at its worst. It is no wonder she is sleeping on the sofa—her bed is covered in newspapers and what looks like my old yearbooks. I have to inch past a collection of stuffed animals all wrapped in dusty plastic to get to her dresser. There are stacks and stacks of papers and medical leaflets around—I think and squint and see the name of a hospital. There are bills and filmy X-rays and ECG printouts which go on and on in lines I can't quite see and again, I wonder if she's ill and then shove that thought away before I can feel panic set in. I grope around, hoping to find the keys but my hand lands on odder things. The bowl which she uses to store her small jewellery collection is filled with some kind of dried-out liquid. I can't find any keys. They might be on her, so I might have to take them from her when she sleeps.

From the kitchen, I hear a loud clanging noise of a falling metal utensil, and then a thump. Like a body hitting the tiles.

I rush out as fast as I can, not caring she will know that I left my room. She's on the floor, a knife in her hand, her pants down around her ankles. What the fuck. The offal smell is almost chokingly strong here.

"Ma? Ma?" Her left thigh is covered in blood-soaked bandages that needed to have been changed days ago. Her right thigh—oh god, she's sliced out a good chunk of it. I look at the cutting board and see that bloody lump of flesh. Look at the porridge bubbling away on the stove.

I shake her. "Ma? What have you done? Where are the keys? Where's your phone?"

She stirs a little as I shake her. "See Ah Mei?" Her breath is sour, bloody. "I told you. I am trying to be a good mother."

"Where are the damn keys, Ma?"

She shudders, says. "You know it's supposed to be the child feeding the parent their flesh to make them strong? But Ah Mei, I do this for you. I am so sorry I didn't do this for you before."

"Ma!" I paw at her pants—try to see if there is anything in their pockets. Nothing. Her sleeves hike up—they are covered in the same bloody bandages as her thighs, except these look even older and crustier.

Oh god—she told me not to waste food. She wanted me to eat—I had been eating—

I turn over and throw up my last meal. It comes out dark, lumpy. Wriggling.

"Ma I need the keys." She turns over and makes an incoherent sound. Under my shaking hands, she is blazing with fever. Probably has some kind of infection. How many times has she done this? How much of her have I eaten? "Ma why did you do this?"

The cat emerges out of nowhere and stares at me again, as though blaming me for all of this. Maybe it is my fault.

I had stopped paying the bill for the landline ages ago, insisting that a mobile is enough, so I don't bother to check the dusty phone in the living room. I check the top of the piano, the sofa, groping uselessly through all the clutter,  trying to find her phone. Nothing. Mounds of dust. My old textbooks. My certificates from school, from my piano exams. All trash.

Then—thank god—I hear people outside the door. Neighbours.

I shuffle to the front door and start banging on it. I don't know if it's the weight of all the locks on the door but it doesn't budge. "Help!"I croak. "Help, my mother!"

I hear them outside.

"This one," someone says. It sounds like the auntie that lives a few doors down, the one who would nod and smile when she used to see me as I left for school. "There's been a weird smell for days."

"When was the last time you saw the owner?"

"We usually see her in the market each week but she hasn't been there for the last couple of weeks."

"I see. Please stand back ma'am."

"No, you don't understand." Auntie sounds almost hysterical. "She was already strange, very strange at the funeral."

"All the more reason to stand aside ma'am. We are trained."

There's a loud bang, and the door rattles against its hinges. I take a step back, and then another.

What funeral?

"Ma'am?" The voice is crisp, officious. "This is the police and SCDF. Please unlock the door or we are coming in."

I can't croak out a reply through my tears. Just glance back at my mother's collapsed body in the kitchen. They can save her, right?

The whirring sound of a saw, something I have never heard outside of a movie. There are sparks against the hinges of the door. Another bang, and the door falls down.

Bright sunlight slices into the dark living room. I throw an arm across my eyes and feel my skin burn.

Behind me, I hear the cat yowl.

Outside, I hear someone scream, scream, scream.

_____