jiaxuan--fictions, long and short

One-nil
Their eyes met briefly; the man in blue smirked before morphing into Alex’s dead brother. The latter shifted his gaze in reflex and only allowed himself a grimace after winning the tussle for the ball. He felt no euphoria as he shot home a match-winner, only the bittersweet sensation of momentarily conquering the robots one-nil.

28 years later
They sat on the benches under the shade of the tree, savouring their ice-creams quietly in the summer evening. The noises in the park—the chirping of birds, the merry screaming of children—made up for the lack of conversation.
“Do you remember,” she started, “The time when these were all real flesh and blood?”

The ring
Through it all, the ring with a rose motif witnessed the diplomatic conversation lined with double meanings, exchanged between two men clad in smart suits.
“Good prospect,” the Mafioso said when the other left, touching the family heirloom.
He did not know that the ring of the Blackrose family had been replaced with a bug.

*
The mother watched as her daughter sat unmoving with a bulky, heavy headset covering her face.

“What’s happening?” The mother thought aloud.

Her daughter’s reply took a while to register. “I’m stranded on an island,” She started finally, before lapsing into another long pause. “Searching food.” Ingrid’s message reached her mother’s mind unclear and halting—she was engrossed in her simulation. The mother stared intently at Ingrid, though the headset and the almost-subconscious security system, and saw a clear picture of Ingrid being marooned on an island with a friend, attempting to gain their bearings in the jungle amidst finding food to satisfy their virtual hunger.

“Do you know what books were?” The mother mused, almost suddenly.

“I’m intent on surviving on the island until I find a way out,” Ingrid explained and paused as she removed the device and set it on her lap. The sentence reached her mother’s mind crystal-clear this time.

“No,” Ingrid finally responded. “Aren’t they extinct?”

The mother nodded and stood up, gesturing mentally for Ingrid to follow. They stood at the corner of the room, by a set of complex switches beside the door. With the mother’s silent command, the switches performed a series of flicks.

Slowly, the room changed—the marble flooring of the living room was replaced with wood and the dark room emanated a warm orange glow; formidable rows of tall shelves stood in front of them. The mother walked towards the sofa in front of the fireplace; Ingrid followed closely behind, with the faint cackling of fire from the fireplace puncturing the silence.

Ingrid’s thoughts were teeming with a multitude of different things. This room was one she had never seen before; the family had no use for them. It looked so different from the rest and her mind buzzed with the discovery of new, queer objects, from the archaic florescent light and its artificial orange glow, to block-like objects that filled the shelves ,and the feel of warm carpet under her feet.

“This is the library,” Ingrid commented furtively and the mother smiled, repeating her sentence with a mix of confidence and amusement.

“What are those?” Ingrid gesticulated for her mother to look at the shelves. “Those block-like objects sitting there.”

Her mother smiled once more; Ingrid had never seen that smile on her mother’s face. It gave a sparkling quality to her mother’s eyes and for a few moments, she looked a little younger. One block appeared on the table in front of them at her mother’s retrieval.

“This,” she proclaimed, pride evident in her voice. “Is a book.”

Ingrid took it, blew the dust off the cover and flipped it open; queer symbols disjointed by a small spacing greeted her. Her mother stood behind and pronounced aloud word for word, and for the first time, she heard the rich tone of her mother’s voice. Together with the enthusiastic storytelling, the words came cleverly together to paint Ingrid a mental picture of an alternate universe she would otherwise never meet. Slowly but surely, Ingrid began to remember the letters, and how they came together to represent the words so frequently exchanged through a matter of thought.


Ingrid could not quite recall how her mother first mentioned books, but she found her mind roaming for ideas and put down her thoughts and fantasies into concrete proof, and when she finished, she dragged her mother to the library and read aloud her first story, of a little girl stumbling into a library for the first time.

My fictions currently centre around stuff I’m preoccupied with, mainly soccer, thrillers and sci-fi. After not being able to write concrete narratives for a while, I found it a little hard to get the words to come together, so mostly these were idea and plot-driven. I’m more satisfied with my 55 fictions because the story’s lacking in detail and the ending was somewhat disappointing and clichéd. Nonetheless enjoy and thanks for comments :D

Jia Xuan (can I use JX? D: )