Short fiction | “The sheets we drape over the things we don’t say”
this is how you walk on the moon
Eds. Patricia Karunungan, Samuel Caleb Wee, Wong Wen Pu
Singapore, Ethos Books 2016
We used to stroll in the park every evening, and he often pointed out the Japanese soldiers in the trees, legs hanging limply from the branches inches above us. I could never see them, but he convinced the child in me they were there. “That’s why the branches are dented,” he’d say. “They’ve been sitting there too long.”
This was my first published short story in a printed anthology. A story about hauntings, spirituality, and superstitions, a young girl must learn to reconcile conflicting beliefs amidst generational traumas.
this is how you walk on the moon is an anthology of anti-realist short stories that navigates the sublime, the subjective, and the inexplicable.
The book was launched at the Singapore Writers’ Festival 2016, where I performed an excerpt of the story with musical accompaniment from local indie-electronic duo, .gif.
I was also one of the panellists invited to read at the #BuySingLit Festival in 2017, where we also talked about anti-realist fiction and postmodernism.
The very first reading of this story took place at the Black Box at NTU, School of Humanities, as part of a special reading with the International NTU-NAC Writer-in-Residence at the time, Madeleine Thien.
Arin Alycia Fong 