0. Editor’s Note

The Great Stratagem of Lady Ikedanbu — Judith Huang

I can’t love artificially I’m too busy falling for my electric kettle
— Cai Png

Cactus Girl, Lobster Boy
— Alastair Wee

The Girlfriend
— Andrew Cheah

Keep Nothing on Your Person
— Levin Tan

Singapore goes cyborg but what
does this mean for families?
— Darcel Al Anthony

Science City #26
— Joseph Tan

Tensile Strength
— S.L. Johnson

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 1
— Vivekanandan Sharan

Cutting the Sapphire: An Interview with Joan Hon, Singapore’s First Sci-Fi Novelist
— Ng Yi-Sheng

A Review: Club Contango by Elaine Boey (Dark Matter INK)
— Wayne Low

Cactus Girl, Lobster Boy

Alastair Wee

Alastair Wee is a Singaporean writer of poetry and speculative fiction. His work has been published in Eunoia Review, Quarterly Literature Review Singapore, and the anthology missed connections: microfiction from Asia.

Cactuses are hardy little tumors. That’s the nag feeling I get, the one that comes as swiftly as it goes, when I have trouble pulling on all my clothes in the morning and catch them in the mirror, all green and bulbous and thriving—the feeling that there’s only so much more this parched girl can give.

There’s no sense of summer in this city, only asphalt heat. On my first night in the hostel the lift posts an out-of-order sign, and I’m sweating through my moving boxes after two flights of stairs. It takes me three tries to fit the key. The first thing I do is to unpack Ma, strewing bits of newspaper packing all over the bed.

Gently, she reveals herself.

The desk has a bad leg, so I rest her carefully on the sill. The blinds pull, but halfway the cord grates in protest and the whole thing snarls, hitching steeply on one side.

This won’t do. I decide against the moon.

One reason I moved—in small Singapore—was the distance; the other, exercise. Down at reception, the night lady who checked me in is nowhere to be seen. There’s someone else there waiting. It happens to be you. I give you a once-over. “Hey, lobster boy!”

You twitch at me.

“Give me a hand with something.”

Back in my room, shining nests of spider-dust curl up from the carpet. Under my close instruction, you flatten loose, crumpled sheets of newspaper up against the glass, spreading dim headlines across the far wall, while I hoist a leg and clamber up on the chair to press on the corners. There’s just enough grime for the paper to stick.

It’s ungainly going, the way we are, but I put in the effort to smile. Ma quivers as you brace a leg against the grille. I reach a finger to stroke her, feeling the stiff tingle as our spines meet, watching the white pall of moonlight shift away from her placid form.

When we’re done I hit the lights, and the room blinks a homely yellow. Ghosts of Blu-Tac speckle the walls, the vague residue of former occupants. Ma has her arms raised, giving a thin, cactus smile. You stand around solemnly, claws in your pants. “Look at us,” I say, wanting to be conversational.

We go to a crowded hawker center for supper. You pull out my chair like it’s a date. The stall owner shouts at you to be gentle on the plastic. I don’t hear what you clack back. I call for two glasses of sweet calamansi syrup—I nearly say calamari—and a big sharing plate of lala bee hoon, cockles with vermicelli. It arrives steaming, with whole-head prawns. Funnily enough, this doesn’t discourage me. You cock an eye as I use my teeth to crack the shell and pick out the good meat, before going off on the head and its juices.

“See,” I say, prickling, my mouth full. “Ma always told me to eat cleanly, finish my plate. Don’t waste, she’d say. Each grain of leftover rice means another pimple on your forehead! And then you will never get a boyfriend!”

You nod and chew, a bevy of mouth-parts working in tandem. One long whisker drools in the broth. From here your chitin looks a wet rock gray, with a sampling of blue and brown on your claws and edges. Banded plates run down your abdomen, clamping round the sides, and your knee pads are thick and hairy. I admire your carapace, how it tints in the harsh hawker light. Two spindly legs drift from the right side of your back.

And there’s something brave about you; something in the way your plates fit. As you reach for straw your joints lock and pivot, and I see it clearly: the fullness of your graft-work, clean and whole, nothing but shell. It’s almost as if there was never anything else underneath.

A sudden determination fills me. Too long, I decide, touching the soft part of my ribs, the empty flab on my thighs. It’s been too long. Too long since I had the courage. This patchwork job of mine—too long overdue.

“You’re gonna help me,” I say, waving my chopsticks in mock carelessness, even though my spines are quivering through my top, and the chlorophyll in my pulse is racing. “You know I’m gonna see this through. And you’re gonna help me.”

You nibble at your noodles in a polite fashion, beady eyes glazing in the noisy heat. It’s a pact, I say, and you tip your head. When the last prawn is left, I skewer it cleanly. We both know better than to ask.

Grafting is a straightforward method of propagating a cactus. By fusing a piece of the original specimen with a compatible rootstock, a successful graft allows the grafted scion to benefit from the characteristics of its new host. The primary purpose of grafting is to increasethe scion’s nutrient uptake and accelerate its flowering cycle, but it can also be done to extend the lifespan of otherwise dying plants.

I guess the real reason I moved was so my dad could date again. It’s healthy for a man not yet fifty, I’d lie and tell him; but instead he used to spend all of his time standing in my doorway, watching as I went about “my gardening”, which is what he told my aunts and uncles I’d been busying myself with. Let her be, he’d say, which made me nonplussed, because I was always the one letting him be. But the first time I properly grafted, I turned to face him, holding my left shoulder back at a careful angle.

“Let’s go out for a change,” he says for the thousandth time.

When he sees it, there’s that flash of shock and reproach, but he swallows it whole before it can burst from his face. Between them Ma had always been the scold. His calm, on the other hand, is palpable. He asks me to pull down my sleeve and leans in to inspect. I struggle not to wince under his gaze.

“You could’ve just gotten a tattoo,” he says at last.

“You said I couldn’t. Besides, this is better.”

My bedsheets crinkle as I shift my weight. My shoulder is itching frantically, more than anything I’d felt before. Still his expression is blank, as if he doesn’t understand. “It’s Ma,” I whisper to him.

He examines, with care, the thorny growth protruding from the top of my shoulder. His gaze follows it down to the join, where cactus meets skin, and the dry brown gauze wadded there.

Then he leaves, closing the door none too softly. I hear his heft against the other side, and sit there in silence, breathing in the crumby smell of loose compost. When his footsteps finally fade, I gather up my books and tools. There’s so much more that needs to be done.

The choice of rootstock for grafting is critical. Not all species of cacti are compatible. In taxonomic terms, the closer the familial relationship between scion and rootstock, the higher the chances of prolonged success.

My new room faces the road. Passing cars shine through sections of newspaper, casting white squares that oblong into the high corner. Ma’s trunk glimmers with patches of wetness, my recent grafts. But there aren’t that many, I think to myself, and she is big and succulent. It gives me no small pride to think of how she’s sprung up, how she’s gone through five pots in three years, the last one almost too big to carry. She grows faster the more I graft her.

Every night before sleep, I imagine the motions, under the blanket. My fingers feel like paperweights. That nag feeling comes again. Cactuses are hardy little tumors. You shift in the bed beside me, and hug your hands around my waist. Your night murmurs are deep and rugged, like the grating of coral. An aquarium song for the molluscs. Against my flesh your plates feel tectonic, listing mighty against the ridges of my back. I nestle even closer. Baby lobsters are translucent and soft, I remember seeing on National Geographic, but you—you now—there’s nothing soft about you.

I suppose I should be thankful. There were plenty of other plants in the principal’s office. I could’ve had orchids sprouting out of every orifice.

At the time I wondered why I was put on the couch, the one reserved for parents. It was the middle of the night. I was still groggy from being pulled out of class camp, and didn’t understand why the principal was there, pacing from wall to wall, her mouth thin like she wore it at morning assemblies, or why my form teacher Ms. Chen in her nightgown wasn’t looking at me, even though I’d put my hand up to ask, or why she kept pulping the same damp tissue, over and over again. Until my Dad swept in and put his hands on my cheeks, his face grim as thunder, and started to say how something bad had happened to Ma, who was walking back from Thursday mahjong. How his headlights hadn’t been on because there was a full moon, the driver said, and he also said there was no reason for her to be jaywalking anyway, because the zebra crossing was only a few meters away, and then it wasn’t a car in the first place but a three-ton lorry, and in fact there shouldn’t have been any reason for it at all, and all I remember was a coldness shooting through my fingers, through my arms and into my chest, and it was a small potted cactus I had been holding, the one I had picked up to keep myself awake. When we left I was still holding it, and in my daze, over the screaming air I heard the principal grudgingly mutter, “let her have it.”

Choose a healthy growing section from the top of the scion’s trunk, typically identifiable by its lighter color and full dome shape. Do not choose a fresh or old branch, or one with rot at the union. Mark it all the way around with a pen. Now prepare the rootstock by doing the same.

Grafting is a private affair, so it takes me a day or two before I let you see how I use my nails to scratch open a spot on my stomach, and show you the tiny pores of red rising to the surface. You look approvingly as I expertly line up a flat cutting and fix her in position with a series of rubber bands. It squidges when you poke it with a claw. I bristle and nearly slap you away on instinct. But you brush my hair and your whiskers tickle me, and I feel your eyes looking down at me, deep and black and full of compassion. When the graft is done, you hold me as I mop up the blood.

Sitting on your bony lap, I watch as you pick through my bag of tools, lifting out a pair of tongs and squeezing them gently.

That’s not the quickest way to do it, you say.

I know, I reply.

Isn’t this why you’ve got me?

There has to be an answer, somehow; but Ma sits idly with one arm shorn, and you clack and soothe my fears away. A memory: one Friday down at the beach with my red pail set, back when I was little. I ran past a pair of twin standing rocks, helping a man chase down his runaway shopping trolley. Ma dragged me away and scolded me in the car ride home, sitting on cotton towels with Dad driving. “What if he was up to no good?” she said, her voice frantic. “What if he snatched you away from me? Then what would I do?” She was always so careful, Ma.

I say nothing.

Then hand me that knife, you whisper in earnest, your chestplate heaving. What’s important now is to get you done.

With a sharp, sterile blade, make the cut.

One time in school, I heard two girls whispering if it was difficult to sleep like this. “Not at all,” I said, and we broke into the teacher’s lounge and I lay down on the plush leather couch. “See?” I said, “the points go right through.” I thought this might impress them enough for us to be friends, but they thanked me, giggling, and hurried off.

Another time on the bus, one of them tried to snip off a spine, so I gave her a faceful. When they sent me home Dad sat me down. He was trying to tell me something, I recall, and I was arguing with him when he turned and slammed his fist into the wall so hard that his knuckles began to bleed, and so I took out my plasters and gauze and we sat there in silence.

Haven’t I seen you before? Lurking in the void deck, staring out of a tank? A gray slip at the corner of vision, a dream after sleep? All cut up, and served in a roll?

It took me three years to get halfway done. That’s because I was careful with Ma, never cutting off too much at a time. Making sure she grew tall. Strong. But you encourage me to be bold. Brave.

It takes us less than two weeks.

Every inch of my body hurts. Spines jut out from every seam.

What remains of Ma is a creamy inner stem, barely a nub poking from the soil. To go fast, you say, we cannot hold back.

Something from the National Geographic programme troubles me. A single lobster only molts once a year, I ask one night, resting in your arms, the grafts on my throat making my voice peel. How long did it take you to get that much shell?

You tell me your secret: the fishery refrigerator.

I find a letter slipped under my door. “Dear Sara,” it begins. I recognize the handwriting. It makes my back tense, every spine straighten. You rustle up over my shoulder as I read. The first paragraph talks about needing to heal; the second, on how you must want to let go. I throw away the letter and compost the envelope. Ma said never to waste.

It makes me so sick to think of Dad. What does he know? I suppose he must have been sad when Ma died, but now he’s started dating again, though he’s tried to keep it from me. The night I leave he hangs in the hallway like a worrisome moth, bobbing back and forth awkwardly, pretending I can’t see him.

“Sure you don’t want to stay?” he says finally, coming to rest at my door. “I’m sure,” I say. I’m busy trimming Ma for the move. A freak rain the previous week caught her out on the balcony during suntime. One of her lower boughs was gangrenous and full of pus. If I’m not careful, the rot will spread.

“Well, you’re welcome home any time.”

Then, “maybe you should leave her here.”

I accidentally snap a spine. It lodges in the soft part between thumb and forefinger, and I fumble in my pack for a pair of tweezers.

The distraction is a welcome one. My Dad doesn’t go to church or temple. Doesn’t light joss sticks, doesn’t pray. He tries to be brave like that. Tonight he’s clean-shaven and in a new shirt, smelling overmuch of coconut and aloe vera. I suppose that’s what the new woman likes. Puppy-grief; I realize, it’s what it is, and each time he asks me if I’m really okay he’s seeing someone else, it brings bile to my lips. I can’t bring myself to tell him that, so there’s no choice but to leave.

Still, a lesser dad might have stopped me, and he presses the house key on me as I go.

As I mention this, your mandibles get agitated. You burble soft things in my ear, things which I already know: that to live is to carry, to hurt is to be. Grief, once expended, is lost, so we carry it with us always. Mothers and fathers come and go, but cactuses and lobsters, you croon; we are immortal.

At the end of those two weeks, we take an afternoon bus down to the beach. I choose an old spot. The fine white sands are warm and firm against my feet. Ma would like it here, I reckon. The water in my flesh lugs noiselessly.

Next to me, restless, your gaze is upon me. For a while I stand there wordlessly, looking out onto the sun and sea, feeling the wind against my spines.

We made a pact, you say, keenly.

“Plant me,” I say at last, and you get to work, bending down to scoop large clawfuls of sand. I dig my toes in, deep as I can, while you pack the sand around my ankles. I feel my feet become turgid with sweat. Soon I’m up to my calves, then my shins. Out on the horizon the sun is starting its far dive, long container ships sliding like dark arrows.

“Plant me,” I say, more insistent this time, and you shovel again with more animation, scattering sand and covering my knees in heat. I squeeze my eyes shut and drag my arms out to the sides, raising Ma up to height. At last that cold feeling starts again, that heavy longing, that numb, shooting chill. Only this time it’s rushing from the inside out, flushing me clean from within, going out through my fingers and feet.

The hush of waves. A slow prickle siphons through my body. My arms lock, my fingers close. My feet, rooting. My head begins to bow. The pain begins to lift. And then my vision, slowly, everything, tapers to a single, green point.

It’s time, Ma. She’s so heavy. We’re both so heavy. And in the end, it turns out, it’s getting easier to stand.

Beside me you crow with victory.

Cold raindrops hit my face. My eyes flinch open. A dark pattern races in from across the sea. Beside me you lunge upright, an awful crick in your back, your claws snapping with sudden mania. All your whiskers are twitching violently. A warning booms from above.

“Plant me,” I cry, “plant me, plant me,” and then a volley of craters erupts in the sand and the storm sweeps in. Your burbling is anguished, and I’m shouting too, but there’s a slashing in my ears and a hot shame in my chest, then the wind throws me and I topple, my base cracking, my hands wrenching free above my head. I hit the ground in a clatter of flesh and spines. I curl my back to protect myself, and end up holding there for so long that I don’t remember whether I did.

When I can move again, the moon in the sky is diamond-bright. It lays on the beach like a silver road. The standing twins are up to their waists in the sea.

A lone sapling grows from one peak. Its leaves are two good ovals, beating together. A pair of lungs in the slow night breeze.

Crawling upright feels like the greatest of concessions. As I do, I spot a scuttle of stick-gray limbs, moving out across the beach. Now I’ve seen you before, I think, before bending over and vomiting, and you become a bit of darkness passing on from the shining sand, disappearing into the sea.

In the end, it somehow doesn’t bother me to find that I’m not brave, brave like you. I guess in that way I’m just like my Dad. Just like how after the beach that Friday I cried myself silly into my blankets, because I couldn’t stop thinking what if that man really had stolen me away, even though I was right here at the dining table and Ma still out there in the living room, and she said don’t be silly because I’ll never let you go like that, and how in the end it was Dad who snuck into my room and sat with me till morning. It doesn’t even bother me that my lease on the room is three months long, or that after I’ve packed my bags and picked up the knife again, my hands hardly tremble as I turn the blade on myself and lop off each green swollen thing, filling the floor with so many cankerous sores.

Someone will find them there, I think, as I throw the keys back to the night lady. Maybe they’ll ask about the girl that came before; how she wasn’t brave, or couldn’t be strong, or what she decided for in the end, about grafting, about needing, about how much it took to dust the sand from her pockets and stick the landing, to let it all go and survive that inconsolable guilt, the incalculable chemistry of living on.

But then it doesn’t bother me anymore. Not even when my own key doesn’t fit, and I realize I threw the wrong set and have to knock like a fool on my own front door. Or when it opens and those words, “dear Sara”, which is what my Dad goes to say, only this time I don’t let him.