Footnote #4: "DIY" and other progressions
amidst a difficult week, here is a fictional offering and the Three of Cups
Dear beloved,
Everyday, I wake up and tell myself I love my country. And every evening I go to sleep, dreaming that I could just pack a bag and leave. And today, today I do not love my country. It is a hard thing to admit as someone who has spent many hours defending this broken country to friends and strangers, and even more to myself in silence.
Maybe tonight I will go to sleep with “I do not love my country” in my heart and wake up tomorrow loving it all over again. When I was young and going to church regularly, I was taught that this was grace.
Today I am thinking about the grace constantly extended to this country that does not love me and mine—by Orang Aslis and refugees and migrants and their children, our East Malaysian brothers and sisters, by those who come back and those who do not, by those who have nothing to gain and who will never have anything to gain. By the people who keep going to jail, who keep waking up each day with the same mantra that feels hollower everyday: I love my country, I love my country, I love my country, I love my country.
Maybe it’s love when you can admit that you’re no longer enthralled by the shiny stories, the cute erasers, the flag, the wistful anecdotes about a time when it was better. Maybe it’s love when all you can see is the toxicity and all you can do is hold each other closer.
I cannot wish you a joyful Merdeka because truthfully, I don’t feel it. Not today, not this year. It’s shadow pretending to be the real deal.
Three of Cups
What remains real is the community that has continued to enrich life in this broken, shadowed place. I think about the friends who have taught me the great value of the sum, the found and biological family who have given taught me the size and worth of grace. I think about those who have come and gone, who leave us with reminders of how to be better.
Kita tak boleh harap dengan para politikus ni, because they will always throw us to the wolves. We can only hold each other. Independence is a myth, a colonial construct. Community is what will ensure we survive.
Image: Three of Cups from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Three women, dressed in white, gold and red, dance in a circle, holding golden cups aloft, against a blue, cloudless sky. All around their feet, the harvest flourishes.
I will wish you a Happy Malaysia Day in the middle of September. In the meantime, I offer you a fictional gift. I wrote this short story, DIY, for the George Town Literary Festival’s short story competition—I didn’t win, but I loved writing this piece. It’s about what comes after suffering, the often cruel but necessary things we must do to survive.
Now, more than ever, writing is helping me survive, saving me from falling into the void, yawning wide. I hope you enjoy it. Please share it if you do.
Thank you for all the love you have given this newsletter. Here’s to us.
yours, from the void, 💖
Sam.
“DIY” (a short story)
Under the shimmering afternoon heat, Maddy Yong waited for Mrs Manjeet to meet her at the low rust-coloured gate. She watched the woman’s two large Rottweilers doze on the patio’s cool marble floor, idly wondering if it was time to get a pet.
“Hi, Mrs Manjeet,” she greeted as her neighbour drew close, her face hidden behind a blue surgical mask. “Just here to bring you some cake. I have a little treat for the dogs too.”
The older woman reached over the gate for the plastic bag Maddy handed over. Inside was freshly baked butter cake and a black tupperware Mrs Manjeet peered into. “Eh, that’s so kind of you. You’re going to spoil the little buggers, hah!”
There was nothing ‘little’ about the large, black creatures whose heads rose above Mrs Manjeet’s hip. One of them perked its head up to stare at Maddy. She smiled at her neighbour. “It’s no issue, you’re helping me clear my fridge.”
“Your husband leh?”
“He’s not here.” Her smile was brittle, frozen. “He didn’t manage to make it back from Singapore before they shut the borders.”
“Oh, what bad luck!” Maddy shrugged but she tell Mrs Manjeet didn’t buy her calm. The cogs were clearly turning in the old woman’s mind.
From her front door, she watched her neighbour empty the contents of the tupperware into the dogs’ silver bowl. The raw mess tumbled into the dish with a muffled squish that Maddy felt skitter across her skin. The dogs strained against their leashes, salivating for their unexpected treat. Mrs Manjeet’s granddaughter watched from the window as the dogs pounced on the meat. The little girl didn’t look away as the sounds of their gorging filled the empty air.
***
Maddy surveyed the tools and materials Jeremy had brought over and began planning her task list for the weeks ahead. Though he hadn’t stayed for long, she was relieved to be alone again. Her brother had spent his entire visit badgering Maddy with questions and incredulity at her newfound eccentricities.
“Well, it’s not like I can ask anyone else to help me right?” she’d finally snapped.
She loved her older brother, but she hated how much he tended to see. She hated how he scrutinised her body for bruises and welts, proof of a fact they never talked about. Maddy wondered what he made of the speckles of blood she knew dotted the crooks of her elbows, her neck, her neat clothes. Did he notice how dried blood curved against the distal borders of her cuticles? Could he sense a thin layer of gristle on her skin?
“I don’t know why you suddenly want to do this kind of thing,” he had said, gesturing at the pile of bricks, wooden planks and cement mix he had brought over at her request.
“I think now is the perfect time to pursue weird projects.”
“Yeah, but most people would choose a hobby like knitting — not building their own kitchen counters or practising how to be a serial killer.”
“If you don’t shut up, I’ll start practising on you.”
After a beat he asked, “You still acting like the chicken man at the market?”
“Aiyah, leave me alone lah.” Maddy folded her hands against her belly to hide the dark red line that cut across the pale surfaces, left from where she pressed down on her cleaver as she sliced through muscle and cartilage. “Everyone gets to have a weird hobby, and this is mine.”
She started shooing him out of her house but he managed to pull her into a tight hug before leaving. He spoke softly,“Is he coming back from Singapore?”
She paused. “I don’t know.” “Good riddance.”
***
Butchering is messy work — blood gets everywhere, leaves rust-coloured splatters on skin, clothes and kitchen walls. Bone chips and ricochets across terrazzo tiles. Muscles and fat surrender to unyielding Japanese metal. Her house was saturated with the smell of coppery blood and chemical disinfectants.
“There’s just so little to do nowadays,” she explained to bewildered family members. “I might as well learn something useful.”
Yet while her friends produced airy loaves of sourdough or grew victory gardens on narrow windowsills, Maddy fell down a Youtube butchery rabbit hole.
The first video fascinated her with its fast jump-cuts, the disembodied hands manoeuvring huge pink-and-white lumps, a soundtrack of electric guitars and thrumming percussions. Twenty minutes later, she clicked on the next video in the series and soon the autoplay function guided her along the intricacies of choice cuts, the marriages of tendon, ligament and muscle, knife work that was half-dance, half-carnage.
Days later, she emerged from a fugue state, brain buzzing with bloody execution, precision blades and neat rumps of meat.
Her favourite videos had featured a Chinese woman in a pristine chef’s jacket who wielded German knives. “Muscles aren’t shaped the way we necessarily want them to be,” she said. “But we can exert our will on them — they can bend to our law.”
Maddy imagined herself capable of such competency: unbuckling seams between rounds of muscle with quick flicks of the wrist. Burying a blade deep within a pocket of soft tissue. The satisfying sensation of gravity-backed force unhooking bone from bone.
The chef’s words ringing in her ears, Maddy began wielding the cleaver she’d inherited from a long-dead grandaunt. The silver metal glinted as she cut and sliced and pulled at muscle and tendon and fascia, scraping against bone. Her freezer filled to brimming. Her hands cramped after long hours at the countertop. She worked away to a pounding rhythm and syrupy radio PSAs that reminded everyone to wash their hands to the tune of “Rasa Sayang”.
In time, she came to learn that flesh hid within itself an unknown hierarchy that unfolded in butterfly-layers before her.
At day’s end, she stored the meat in a large white freezer unit at the back of the house before returning to scrub the kitchen clean. The freezer had been a wedding present from her father who bought it when Maddy moved into the house with the big rambutan tree. He wanted lots of grandkids, he said then. It seemed like such a hopeful thing: a big freezer, a big family, a big rambutan tree. Symbols of potential and wealth.
Now, it felt like she had climbed into the thing herself, all her once-functioning parts frozen.
When Maddy finished the last of her butchery, she packed the knives away.
She turned off the porch lights, the lamps in the big living room that had never entertained guests. He hadn’t liked having people over because all her friends didn’t like him — why should he have any of them in his house? It hadn’t mattered back then, but now she felt the hollowness expand beneath her ribcage.
To one side of the kitchen, were large buckets of concrete mixed with water into the perfect consistency. Properly proportioned, the mix would make the rock impenetrable. Marriage didn’t last, but she could bury her wounds in a memorial of stone.
In the middle of the room sat the skeleton of a new kitchen island. Over the slow and solitary weeks, Maddy had bound brick to brick and wood to wood in a rectangle. Now, she began pouring the cement into the hollow recess of the island, bucket by bucket. It took a lot of mixture, seemingly endless amounts of dense liquid rock that strained her arms and back—but the butchery had made Maddy strong. It was as though the ritual was turning her bones into stone.
When she was done, she pulled a large packet from the freezer. One corner was torn from where shrapnel jutted out. In the dimness of the kitchen, Maddy opened the bag and stared at her husband’s fleshless bones. She had spent ages breaking them into jagged little pieces that fit easily in her palm. In their smallness, they were intimate to her in a way her husband had never been in life.
In death, they seemed to glow with an unearthly light that belied their ordinariness. He would have hated the ignominy of his quiet, unremarked-upon death.
One by one, she dropped them into the cement, watching them sink.
***
Truth be told, Maddy had dreamed of the moment she would kill her husband for many years but she just hadn’t imagined she would actually do it. Much less with barely any hint of regret.
At the very least, she thought it would be difficult.
And yet, when she stared at her husband’s body in those early MCO days as it lay facedown on the floor and bleeding out, she realised that it had been so very easy. Probably the easiest thing she’d ever done.
She could not say she had not planned to kill him. How could she when one had to account for the to-do lists, the shopping lists, the carefully revealed bruises on her belly and legs, the innocent request for cement?
But it also wasn’t like she sat down and drew up a diagram of where, when and by which method she would slaughter him. No, all those things were happenstance, she was sure:
the virus that kept them all inside, the firing from his job, his prideful nature that made him keep it a secret, the final fight that cut the last ties she had to him.
Everyone had told her marriage was hard — some had even said marriage to him would be a mistake — but Maddy came from the school of hard-knocks. There, she was taught that anything worth doing was going to be hard. She was a striver, a born domestic labourer formed from a generations-old stock of Petaling Jaya housewives. If anyone was going to make it work, it was going to be her: Maddy Yong.
So maybe it also made sense how easy it had been to take her swinging cleaver to his throat. The knife she used was one she employed daily. The existing wounds were deep and festering. The cut had even been elegant, balletic. Maddy had been a dancer before she became a housewife — before she became another abuse statistic. In that way, she felt as though she had been preparing to kill him from the moment they signed the marriage papers at the PJ State offices.
Wearing an oversized shirt printed with an angry Doraemon graphic, Maddy padded down to the big white freezer unit. An electric feeling buzzed in her blood as she opened the freezer to look at the plastic packages of meat that had once been her husband. Dark maroon patches had seeped through the paper in frozen Rorschach shapes.
"There was so much more blood in you than I thought,” she said to him, thoughtful. “How do you keep surprising me?”
She pulled the plug on her big white freezer full of unrealised dreams before climbing into the shower to scour her skin clean.
***
Three days later, Mrs Manjeet joined her outside her gate as Alam Flora workers carted away the sacks of stinking refuse. Maddy was glad they had an audience as the men gracelessly tossed him into the truck.
“Aiyo, what happened? What is that smell?”
“A fuse blew in my house and killed my freezer in the middle of the night.” Maddy threw her hands up, sighing dramatically. “All the meat my cousin gave me rotted for two days before I figured out where the stench was coming from. Now all wasted!”
Her neighbour clucked her tongue. “And in this heat some more, your kitchen must really stink.”
“Yeah lah.” She turned to the older woman’s house and saw her granddaughter peering at her through black metal grille, eyes distrusting. Maddy waved but the little girl ducked behind a curtain.
“Mrs Manjeet, I have more meat for your dogs,” she said. “I kept them in the fridge so they didn’t rot but they aren’t very fresh anymore.”
“Wah! Some of us have all the luck.”
“They’ll be doing me a favour.” The words came to her so easily, she marvelled at herself. “I have an excuse to buy more fresh food.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” said Mrs Manjeet. She jutted her chin at Maddy’s house. “Where is your sir? Still not back yet ah? I thought they let the Malaysian workers balik already.”
Maddy shook her head. She watched the garbagemen leap onto the back of the truck as it rumbled away. The stench of rotting flesh lingered in the air, but Maddy could already smell her rambutan tree bursting with ripeness. “Maybe when this is all over.”