amoeba (Page 2)

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Festina Lente

The motorcycles swarm and huddle in the shade under the bridge, like so many angry bees, waiting for the green disc up ahead to light up, so they can soar back into the sunshine. Summer is like that, here. I see us jumping from pocket of shade to pocket of

Sarabat

‘Chee cheong fan, one please,’ I ask the lady who is stooped, scowling, behind the counter. ‘Pork. You can, ah?’ she retorts. ‘No problem’ ‘Chilli? Dai, ah. Dai dai.’ ‘Please, and a coffee. Kopi o. Siew dai, okay?’ ‘Can. You sit, ah. I bring’ and she smiles as she takes

Enter Bangkok

I thrash back and forth for an hour in the pre-dawn fuzz before giving up and hauling myself upright. The air-con has clicked off at some time during the night, and it is hot already, as the sun creeps around edges of stippled grey. A tepid shower, in the haphazardly

Mobile Love

A stream of Daft Punk helmeted motorcyclists zip past, the single traffic light reflected as a jagged lipstick red smear in their mirrored visages. They lean hard to avoid the bus. Kick up dust. I give my window a half-hearted tug, but it is wedged open, and the tiny half

The Shock of the New World

The Shock of the New World

The Shock of the New World, with respect to the flora and fauna of Australia [http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/07/the_shock_of_th.html]: > Australia was familiar – same language; a shared culture to a large degree, more so than America – but utterly foreign at the same

We Can Be Heroes

We Can Be Heroes

A thousand windows of a hundred hotels face me all at once, black, punctuated by a flickering pulse on identical ceilings, blue, in synchronised media fulfilment. All I can see are his legs, thin, with tight black jeans and simple white shoes. A bare wooden floor. The ornamental façade of

Leschenaultia

She remembers swimming here as a child, her brothers splashing and taunting her from the deeper water as she stood at the end of the jetty and held her nose. Remembers bombie competitions from that same jetty, before they put up the signs about amoebic meningitis. A cartoon man holding

A handful of Pakora

A handful of Pakora

The station in Jalgaon is small in comparison to the Victorian grandeur of Chattrapati Shivaji in Mumbai. Three sleepy platforms, attendants sprawled head to toe against the dusty outbuildings while the pakora vendors heat oil for the first batch of the day. Even the flies seem slow and disinterested. The

Barracuda

"Do you think it’s like this as a matter of course? Do you think people wake up, roll over, and say things like that spontaneously? Or do you think it takes an army of pale underlings, in a room without windows, digging at an archived picture of the

Alien Splendor

It took us a long time to drive there. The map written in tiny kanji characters that left me in the front squinting and tracing words with my finger, soundlessly voicing pronunciation options until one clicked. The stereo was bassy, kick drum to the chest and the water rippling in