Kristang short fiction sample
Text from Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (15(1) January 2016)
It Happened at Mount Pleasant
By Melissa De Silva (2016)
His eyes linger over her once more.
Her pencil poised a half-inch above her notebook and her lips taut, the nine-year-old is a prim receptionist.
As the taxi zooms through the night, they are in a private cocoon of PVC and citrus air freshener. He cannot tear his eyes from her tiny wrist as she marks three columns down the page. She is more resplendent than a thousand Botticelli goddesses. But it is when she begins labelling the top row across the columns that his heart trembles. No little receptionist is this delight; she is a cataloguer, just like him. What are the odds of that?
He never had the opportunity before. By day he was buried in the bowels of the museum, classifying, labelling and archiving. In rare moments he’d catch drifts of children’s shrieks piercing the calm, the thunder of little feet across the timber floorboards above. Sometimes, he would be so exhilarated he would come up for air, his eyes blinking in the midday sun, on the pretext of taking his lunch break at the bench under the angsana tree by the river. Then he would scurry past those compact bodies, damp with terror that his one surreptitious glance would unleash an arrow from the teacher-in-charge.
But here she is, and he has fate to thank for bringing them together.
He’d been flagging a cab along that godforsaken street outside the museum after working late when she’d popped up in her school pinafore. Struck dumb, he took in the halo of fuzz around her hairline, the backpack like a slab of pink cement strapped to her torso.
“Excuse me Uncle, can I share your taxi?”
He could only nod.
The air-conditioning in the taxi is freezing. Sweat is beading on his upper lip, drenching his mid-section, making his shirt stick to the mound of his belly. He hastily pulls the damp fabric away from himself and snuck a look to see if she’d noticed. Her head of lustrous waves, gathered in a ponytail and fastened with a furry purple scrunchie, is bent over the notebook.
He checks the rear-view mirror. The driver is so short, he could only see the top of the man’s bald head which glints in the ripples of tungsten streetlamp. The girl is absorbed in scribbling. With a feint of a casual stretch, his arm reaches across the back of the seat and rests there, thrillingly close to the back of her head, but without actual contact. Perhaps it is more thrilling because contact seems inevitable yet impossible. He yearns for them to talk, but has no idea how to break the silence. He blames it on his damned work; he’s been too isolated from other people. Making conversation, which comes naturally to others, is wracked with anxiety for him. Sometimes when he was down there working alone, his thoughts would wander to the days of World War II, to the eruptions of bloodshed that splattered the colonial building which is now so prettily restored. He imagined the B-negatives and A-positives intermingling with abandon, the sticky ABs and the easy-going Os, a tango of proteins seeping from broken receptacles of Japanese or Allied flesh.
The next move in his romantic siege is worrisome. What if she screams before he has the chance to win her over? The driver will be on the phone with the police in a heartbeat. If only he has cake. That chemical bomb rainbow one. She’d be eating out of his hand. At that instant, the unwelcome thought of the Italian serial killer Leonarda Cianciulli, who had murdered three women and drained their blood to make teacakes, flits into his mind. How could that woman have believed human sacrifice would save her son from getting drafted into the war? She’d even given them to her son to eat, these blood-curdled teacakes. Monster. And surely the boy would have tasted something strange? If you put enough chocolate in a cake, could it actually disguise the taste of blood? It probably wouldn’t work with vanilla. Maybe it was because they were poor, World War II was looming, and any cake you got you were grateful for. He shudders.
With a shake of his head, he brings himself back to the present. Perspiration spreads across his back now. He tries to generate casual banter: “Why were you in town? No schools there.” He glances out the window in feigned nonchalance and realises where they are.
He tries his best not to sound alarmed. “Uncle, which route did you take? Why are we going this way?”
But the driver does not respond. He cannot catch the man’s eye in the rear-view mirror.
The girl finally speaks and asks: “What’s your type?”
He whips back his hand as if the upholstery has singed him. “What? What do you mean?” Goddammit, he hasn’t even the chance to initiate anything and she’d called him on it.
Her exhalation is impatient. “Your type? You know? Every human has one? A? B?”
A nervous laugh escapes before he can catch it. “Um, it doesn’t matter to me about grades.”
He fixes his gaze out the window and pretends to be absorbed in the view. Then horror strikes. The road sign ‘Mount Pleasant Road’ flashes into sight in the taxi’s beam. As the vehicle swerves around one curve of the narrow road then another, the saga trees’ gnarled fingers appear to press close, as if eager to crush the vehicle.
“Uncle, I never told you to take this route!” He hears the hysteria in his voice and hates it. Damn those stories of Pontianak roaming this stretch of jungle. They would appear in front of your car, sending you swerving into a waiting bush; or, more terrifyingly, they’d morph from alluring women into demented white creatures with glowing eyes and ragged manes. Even the human presence of black-and-white colonial houses nestled among the trees does not deter the revenants.
The car zips past Burmese banyan trees with aerial roots. They are going to encounter a Pontianak, he knew it. His shirt is plastered to the entire front of his body now, outlining his belly to the girl, but he no longer cares.
“Uncle? Uncle!” His hand is about to tap the man on the shoulder then pulls back. A crazy idea pops into his mind. What if—what if the driver is actually a pontianak? What if they could now somehow take on the male form too? Aiyah, if only he and the girl had gone somewhere to have a meal, like ice-cream, this night would have turned out so sweetly different.
The car drives past a cluster of palm trees. There, between two lissome trunks, a phosphorescent glow against the dark. He yelps.
Something tugs his left shirt sleeve. He yelps again.
It’s the girl.
“Did you see that?” he stammers.
Her eyes look innocent. “See what?”
He cranes his neck back but the creature has either vanished or is hiding in the dense forest.
The girl tugs his sleeve again. “What’s your type?”
“What?”
She picks up the pencil, poised for notation.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His eyes wander to the clump of trees growing tinier behind them. His throat is dry. What if the pontianak is flying right above their car?
Another tug on the sleeve. Her eyes are an earnest glisten.
“Your type. Uncle, what’s your blood type?”
An AI-Dreamfished Analysis of “It Happened At Mount Pleasant”, by Melissa De Silva (2016)
Episodic Structure over Linear Plot
It Happened at Mount Pleasant unfolds not as a cleanly escalating plot but as a sequence of intensifying psychological episodes. Each paragraph functions as a discrete moment of fixation, fear, or misinterpretation, accumulating tension through juxtaposition rather than causal progression. The story drifts between the taxi ride, the man’s interior monologue, imagined histories of violence, folkloric dread, and sudden present-tense interruptions. This episodic structure mirrors Kristang short fiction’s tendency to privilege experiential density over narrative resolution. What “happens” is less an external event than a series of internal thresholds crossed, with the Mount Pleasant road acting as a liminal corridor rather than a destination.
Intimacy as Narrative Scale
The narrative scale is claustrophobically intimate. The taxi becomes a sealed chamber where breath, sweat, glances, and imagined touch take on disproportionate weight. Rather than zooming outward to social consequence or moral judgment, the story insists on staying inside the man’s bodily sensations and anxious projections. This intimacy is deeply unsettling precisely because it refuses distance. Kristang short stories often operate at this scale, forcing readers into close proximity with discomfort rather than offering explanatory relief. The child’s presence is not sensationalised through action but through the adult’s distorted perception of her ordinariness, making intimacy itself the primary site of horror.
Embedded Orality and Spoken Texture
Although written in polished prose, the story is saturated with spoken texture. Colloquial phrases (“Uncle,” “Aiyah”), internal mutterings, half-formed questions, and imagined dialogue create a rhythm closer to overheard speech than literary narration. The man’s thoughts jump associatively, mimicking oral digression rather than linear reasoning. This embedded orality situates the story firmly within Southeast Asian speech worlds, where meaning is often carried through implication, tone, and shared cultural reference rather than explicit statement. The effect is one of constant near-speech: words are almost spoken, almost confessed, but rarely completed.
Memory as Active Reconstruction
Kristang short fiction frequently treats memory as a living force that reshapes perception moment by moment, rather than as a stable archive. Here, historical violence and personal isolation bleed into the present taxi ride, collapsing temporal distance and turning the mundane into something menacing. Memory in the story is not retrospective but actively intruding. The man’s recollections of museum work, wartime bloodshed, serial killers, and folklore do not explain his present so much as contaminate it. These memories are reconstructed on the fly to justify, delay, or displace his current anxiety and deeper analysis of his own behaviour.
Cultural Knowledge without Explanation
The story assumes, rather than explains, a dense web of cultural knowledge: pontianak lore, blood types, colonial architecture, taxi etiquette, the social meaning of “Uncle,” and wartime scarcity. None of these elements are glossed for the reader. They are simply present, operating as shared references that shape fear and misunderstanding. This refusal to explain is characteristic of Kristang short stories, which often trust the reader to sit with partial comprehension. Cultural knowledge functions here as atmosphere rather than exposition, deepening unease through what is recognised but not unpacked.
Quiet Irony and Emotional Restraint
Despite its disturbing subject matter, the story is marked by emotional restraint. There is no overt condemnation, no narrative voice stepping in to moralise. Irony emerges quietly through contrast: the man’s florid romantic language sits uneasily beside the banal reality of a child doing homework; his fear of monsters coexists with his own moral blindness. The final revelation is delivered without flourish, allowing the irony to land coldly. This restraint aligns with a Kristang aesthetic that often prefers understatement to spectacle, trusting irony to do its work without explicit commentary.
Ambiguous Endings and Open Futures
The ending does not resolve the tension so much as reframe it. The child’s final question exposes the depth of the man’s misinterpretation while leaving his intentions, and the immediate outcome of the taxi ride, unstated. The horror shifts from supernatural fear to ethical recognition, but without closure. Kristang short stories frequently end at such moments of recalibration, where meaning snaps into focus just as the narrative stops. The open ending forces readers to carry the discomfort forward, rather than sealing it within a finished moral lesson.
Negotiation of Mixedness and Belonging
At a deeper level, the story negotiates forms of mixedness—between past and present, folklore and modernity, scientific classification and superstition. The man’s obsession with categorisation (museum artefacts, blood types) collides with his inability to read social reality accurately. Belonging is repeatedly misjudged: he imagines affinity where there is none, danger where there is none, and innocence where there is threat. This misalignment reflects a broader Kristang preoccupation with fractured belonging in postcolonial, multi-layered societies, where shared markers do not guarantee shared meaning. The story exposes how easily systems of classification can fail when detached from ethical clarity.