Sing, beloved city,

of how she devoured me.

Why don’t you talk to me in real life, she asks.

What do you mean real life.

Outside of this. She shrugs, hair swirling in a gentle halo, anemone-like. When I’m not dreaming.

You understand me better here.

She shifts against the weeds, glances up blindly at the skeletal underbelly of the floating city. I don’t know about that. Above, a network of steel and burbling pipes. Below, the suggestion of coral bleached to the colour of bone.

Anyway, I’m still working on it. She is still looking away, eyes shining. I’ve written a few drafts, but most of them are pretty bad. You stare at her. Give me more time, I’m almost there. 

For a brief moment, you consider ripping her throat out. While you can still fossilise this human innocence, while desire swirls in you like mud in a mangrove. 

You made an oath, you say. She winces. I cannot stay for long, you know this. 

I’ll write more when I wake up, I promise.

You watch her for a moment. There is a school of thought that suggests sirens sing to ships that are already doomed, less to charm them and more to reassure them the ocean is less terrifying than they think. All lies, of course, but it doesn’t matter because the sailors never really listen. Minutes before they drown, all they do is stare, eyes shining. 

You reach out and touch her. Somewhere, a single string in the net splinters.

In the last languid days of the world, I worked as a marketing assistant at a children’s swimming school, ate a lot of kelp noodles, and had the same dream over and over again.

A decade after the floating city had been established, I found myself graduating from a major that was to be abolished that year, holding a Classics degree that had no relevance to water purification, marine engineering, or anything to do with reality. So, like most of my peers in the Arts, I pivoted to the education market—most industries had gone under when we converted to aquaculture and pontoon-type technology, but the tuition market, in true Singaporean fashion, had exploded like an algae bloom. No matter that geography and governance as we knew it had collapsed, everyone still had to take A Levels, and it was imperative that ah boy was signed up for open water survival camps, underwater aerobics courses, aquatic expression workshops. My boss, a Malaysian Chinese man who had lost contact with his family the moment Sarawak went under, was one of the first to set up the Preparatory Pelagic Programs, courses that taught babies as young as 8 months-old to paddle. 

Our specialist centre boasts of a variety of temperature-regulated pools with fixed pH levels and current velocity, I wrote in various lifestyle magazine ads. Chlorinated just enough to simulate a seawater environment without irritating your infant’s skin with harmful pollutants. Join our 6-month program to give your child the most holistic headstart in water competency possible!

So in that half-drowned world, I worked in a tuition centre that built pools for toddlers to swim in the sea without actually swimming in the sea. And at night I would dream. 

Of walking towards a shoreline that no longer existed, caressed by the sand and saltwater, pulled gently into a womb-like warmth. Of drifting into the darkness towards a chorus of low, humming voices, chasing the sound the way Theseus followed a line of thread into the maze. The water grew denser the deeper I travelled, weeds tangled more insistently around my limbs. Tendrilled shadows swept past, hungry and jellyfish-like. If I swam far enough, she would find me. 

Her breath coiling through the current. The barnacled texture of her skin. 

In the strange unreality of those days, where Jakarta sank beneath the waves and I made Instagram reels of infants in swimsuits, where the automobile industry collapsed and Singaporeans lost contact with their families in Johor Bahru, where the price of agriculture skyrocketed and hawker centres replaced kway teow and bee hoon and mee tai mak with kelp noodles, I took the morning ferry to work and made advertisements. 

And every night, she would ask me if I was finished.

No, I would reply.

I am running out of time.

Floating half-blind in the darkness, those nights were the only reality I could understand.

Sing, beloved city,

of how I slipped through the sand,

into the soft crevice of a gaping mouth,

the inward suck of air and the gasp of waves,

the blind gnashing of her teeth against my neck.

When I first met her, she was pleased that I understood what kleos was.

Glory, yes. Her hair rippled along my shoulders like eels. But it is more than that. 

I swallowed. It means legacy, memory, the hero’s life—

It is everything. She traced a yellow nail across my jaw. The chorus grew in intensity. To die without kleos is to have never existed at all. I have no children left, and the age of heroes is over. Anchored to the darkness below, the weeds twined between my legs. That man of many wiles, his ship. I can barely remember how many of his crew I killed. I need you to speak for me.

I could hear the blood in my ears, the thunder of its insistent pulse. You want me to … speak about you? 

To be my poet, my ἀοιδός. Her eyes shone like anglerfish. I pulled you from the net of dreamers to sing for me, to carry my name through generations. The weeds curled along my thigh. The ocean is unrecognisable now. The muses are gone, and I do not have much time left. She drew closer, leaning into the space above my shoulder. I could feel her exhale like silk unfurling against my neck. I need you. Speak for me.

A warm current swept past, encircling my waist. 

Even with the heat blooming between my ears, a part of me was lucid enough to feel sorry for her. All that talk about legacy and the age of heroes—it was such an incoherent desire, one both ancient and childlike. What on earth makes you think that kleos has any place anywhere, anymore? I wanted to say. We can’t afford rice, and barely anyone my age wants to have children. How do I carry your name through generations that won’t exist?

How did you end up here, I asked instead. 

She drew back and fell silent. 

I lost my way, she finally answered. As I said, the ocean has become unrecognisable.

“Hey, are you busy?”

I switched to another tab. 

“I saw that,” Cass said. “It’s fine. Come help me with putting up the mosquito nets, the new ones just arrived.”

I shut my laptop and followed her out to the main pool area, trying not to slip on the wet tiles. Cass was still wearing her swimsuit, her instructor’s windbreaker thrown loosely over it and a delivery parcel crinkled under one arm. “Did you just finish class?” 

“Yeah, an hour ago.” She reached the edge of the pool and tore open the package, pulling out the sheets of white netting. “Has anyone shown you how to put this up?”

“Not really.”

“Okay, so.” She dragged the foldable ladder over with a screech and leaned it against a pillar, gesturing. “You have to hang this at the top of the banister, loop it through the 3M hook, and if you put that chair—yeah, like that. Great.”

Chlorine wafted up from the pool as we worked. “Why don’t we just get thicker ones? Then we don’t need to keep replacing them.”

“Cheaper,” she said. “Also, the mayflies keep getting stuck in them.”

“There’s been a lot of them, huh?”

“Which is weird, because they’re not even native to this area. You can’t even blame it on the monsoon season.” 

I glanced at her. Sometimes I forgot that Cass was an Entomology student before she dropped out. Most of the swimming teachers were in their early to mid-thirties, so Cass and I stuck together during lunchtime because we were the closest in age. She was impeccably kind to the toddlers, ran a surprisingly profitable cosplay account on Tiktok, and kept a collection of pod vapes at the back of her work locker. “Anyway, what were you doing on your laptop just now?”

“It’s like,” I fumbled with the net. “Like, a thing I’m trying to write.”

“Like a CV?”

“Like a fiction thing, a story.” I sighed. “But I can’t come up with anything, and I’m not sure I’ll make the deadline.”

“Whatever it is, try to do it outside the office. There’s a camera in there.” I whipped around to look at her. “Yah, really. Last week the IT guy had to fix the boss’s laptop, right? I walked past and I saw—” she glanced around. “—I saw CCTV videos of the office. You can see everything there. So at least do it outside at the benches or something.”

Why did you choose me.

Why not? 

The weeds curled around my neck. It’s not like there aren’t other writers. Or artists, or historians. On some nights, the chorus of voices was a distant melody. On others, it throbbed through the water like a pulse, like the hunger of an incoming storm. You could have chosen someone more qualified. 

She paused. Why does it matter to you.

Why? The chorus howled. In the glow of her anglerfish eyes, in a last attempt at self-preservation, I clamped my mouth shut. 

You bring me here every night, I thought, into this place of bleached coral and shadow, where the lack of light is a liquid filling my eyes and nose, and you tell me to sing a song in a language that I do not understand. And I still don’t understand. And yet, night after night, I refuse to run from the shore, I refuse to shudder from the cold, I walk straight into the ocean like a sleepwalker and imprison myself in your gaze because it is the only thing I can understand anymore. All I want to know is why. Why was I chosen. Do you even know my name? 

I glared at her, silent.

Your eyes are shining. There was no anger in her voice, just the curiosity of a child watching a trail of ants, magnifying glass in hand. Little poet.

She reached out and pressed her palm against the side of my head. Her arm was encrusted with barnacles, but her hand was warm and soft. 

My poet. Is there something you want?

The weeds tangled themselves along my legs. 

I want you to say my name, I thought. You must know it. Hold me as you say it, just once, and tell me you have the answers. The answers to everything. Say it. Tell me you know whatever claws its way out of my chest in the day and pushes me into the ocean at night, away from the noise and the emptiness and the sun and towards you, again and again and again and again. Say it. 

I kept quiet.

After we are done, you can tell me what you want, she said. Till then, write.

Sing, beloved city,

of the fable of her.

The way it dangles like a sword, 

peering over the edges of my aches

When Cass had to teach during our lunchtime hours, I would take the shuttle ferry to the nearest hawker centre to eat. 

The platform that held it creaked and the toilets were constantly infested with flying insects, but it was the only eatery nearby that was still affordable and, unlike the vending machines in our school, not kelp-based. If I boarded the ferry early enough, there would even be real seafood. Sometimes steaming bowls of hae mee, freshly-shelled in a bed of hot gravy, sometimes sambal stingray, grilled with lemongrass and wrapped in real banana leaves. I would eat in the corner nearest to the edge of the platform, wipe the debris off the table, and attempt to write. 

I sat on a plastic stool and stared at the crossed-out sentences in my notebook, tapping a pencil against the synthetic paper. Even in the sober heat of the afternoon, I felt paralysed. What right did I even have to represent a life that had spanned hundreds, no, thousands of years? Where was I even supposed to start? A few nights ago, I had tried getting her to tell me about her past, but the places and names she described were practically indecipherable. She refused to explain them, to put them in any kind of historical context, or even to admit that they had long vanished without trace. I seemed to be shrinking under the sheer pressure of my own ignorance. When I told her that I didn’t recognise any of the people she was talking about, she would get angry and refuse to appear. Those were the worst nights; dreams where I wandered around the darkness, lost in weeds and murmuring voices. 

In her absence, the magnanimity of the ocean weighed on my body like grief.

Ache, I wrote. Crossed it out. 

I lifted my head and watched a swarm of mayflies hover over the table next to me. An elderly cleaner shuffled over, sneezed, and swung a tattered towel violently at the swarm. A few landed on the table with a smack.

My phone buzzed. 

—Hi, sorry to disturb you during lunch

—Take down the reel you posted yesterday. The children in it are not swimming with proper breaststroke technique—this will hurt company reputation

I squinted at my phone.

—May I please clarify that you’re referring to the Toddler Summer Fun reel? 

—The children in it are 2 years old. Also, they’re playing water polo.

—Some are not participating enough—we want to see active enthusiasm

—BTW lunch break is between 12-2pm. Are you coming back anytime soon?

I fought the urge to throw my phone into the sea. I stared at the crossed lines on my notebook, the dead mayflies on the next table, and wondered what the point of recording anything was. That cohort of toddlers might be the last children that Singapore might even have. Who cared if they were participating actively in anything? Who cared about mosquito nets, kelp diets, poetry? Who cared—most ridiculous of all in the humidity and the lunch crowd and the sticky plastic stools—about kleos?

—I apologise, I’ll delete it now

—On the way back

I ripped out the page and put my face in my hands. 

Sing, beloved city,

of the times I turned around.

Again and again,

she forgives me and disappears.

I couldn’t find her that night.

I drifted through the darkness, anxiety blurbing up my sternum. Without the glow of her eyes, reflected against her scales, I couldn’t even sense the movement of the water currents. The chorus was gone. I understood then, for the first time since I walked into the ocean, how strange it was that I existed in this place every night, how unnatural it was to be pulled so far from the living world with its despair and worries and unending desires. 

The water was unbearably cold. 

I gave up on the pursuit and curled up, arms wrapped around my knees. The ocean was as still as air. All those times I had been with her, I realised, the currents had pulsed because of the way she engulfed this place, and the weeds were soft because she wanted them to be. Without her, I was suspended in this valley of utter silence. Floating in emptiness, the last living thing for many miles.

And suddenly, I understood.

On Thursday, I told Cass I was going on a trip over the long weekend.

“It’s a diving thing,” I said. Just in case I didn’t return.

I know how to speak for you.

Her hair twined along my arms, encircling my waist. You do?

I do. My mistake, all along, was that I forgot that this world operated by the rules of a dream, that I was speaking to a being—part goddess, part monster, part woman—who had never known what songs or poetry or words even were. What I wrote never mattered in the first place. I swam towards her, circled my arms around her barnacled neck, and whispered into her ear.

She smiled as bubbles rose from her scales like a million pearls, the size of roe and the colour of milk.

Well done, she said. Tell me what you want, poet.

Say it.

What?

Say it. My throat clenched. Why you chose me.

She blinked. Then she laughed, soft and low. All right, she said. I’ll tell you. She held my face with both hands and pressed her forehead against mine. The bubbles engulfed us like steam, disintegrating against her neck and her face and her anglerfish eyes. This ancient creature, I thought desperately. This ancient creature, this violent longing. Already, her shoulders were crumbling. 

I held onto her arms as they collapsed like ash.

I reached out to the net of dreamers, she said, each soul fluttering within it. Yours was the closest and loosest. Your life dangled from the net like a cocoon, and I plucked you off and unfurled you just as easily. I could have swallowed you whole.

I thought—

That you were special?

I thought people usually chose someone skilled or.... Bile rose in my throat. Or someone good to give you kleos. Someone you loved, in the age of heroes.

My poet. My sweet ἀοιδός. Her eyes shone sadly. It’s far too late for that.

Then she kissed me, and light flooded into the water, searing through the fleeing shadows and the fish and crescendoing chorus, roaring like a heartbeat. She laughed as the tides drew us apart, flushed and exhilarated. Her tongue tasted like lightning. Suddenly I was falling backwards, rising to the surface, and she was plummeting into bleached coral below, a thousand pearls dissolving between my fingers. I screamed, clawing at the light and her laughter, wailing that I would undo the song, that I regretted everything, that there was nothing for me back in the land and the air and the empty sun.

μίμνησκε, she whispered. Remember me.

I woke up sobbing.

If you sat on the back staircase of the office and looked past the exhaust fans, you could see the shuttle ferries moving out of the station. 

A puddle of rainwater had gathered in the corner of the staircase, its surface broken by hovering mayflies. I nudged my lunchbox away from them. Cass had once mentioned that mayflies live the shortest lives of all animals—that they spend years submerged as nymphs, only to emerge for a single day of reproduction and death. I imagined a mayfly raising its damp wings to the sun, meeting death the way a baby meets its mother’s face for the first time. Grateful for the humidity, the frenzy of mating bodies, the searing sunlight. Nestling into the evening chill and falling asleep forever. 

Maybe we overestimated ourselves, I thought, watching the ferries hum against the wine-dark sea. Even if we floated above it, we were still bound to the ocean, engulfed in all its weight and inescapable history. To believe otherwise was a kind of hubris. But we had believed otherwise anyway, and so each of us had become something smaller, less human, suspended in a brittle net of want and memory. And then she appeared. At the wrong time, in the wrong place. My Scylla, my monstress, my deathless siren of anglerfish light. Longing, in that empty, unmoving ocean, for things that had not existed for centuries. How could anyone blame her? The only alternative was to grieve. 

And grief, I realised, is something humans are better at.

I picked up my lunchbox and walked back to the office. It was a long time before I started dreaming again.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: Arturo Serrano.

Accessibility Editor: The Accessibility Department.