Christian Yeo: “The Year of Short Stories”
We met at university, that most acceptable story.1
This was before your fiction classes, what you called
the middle2 of the end. You laughed that laugh, but when
you threw your head back, the new earrings caught the light.
People always ask me how we knew. They want a sign, some
guarantee of their own security. She segmented it, not me,3
I say, though these days she says she knew when she knew.4 5 6
1I think everyone has a brutal, fantastical lost love,
K extemporises, blowing out smoke
unironically, the trick is in finding the right
memories. In lieu of protest I eat a mint,
try not to breathe in the spirals of smoke.
Munro beat Chekhov and we all know it, she says,
waving about sagely, as if holding a firefly.
2Urban Dictionary defines “light” as “really bright stuff,” as in “Shit, look at all that whiteness” / “Yep, that’s light” / “Wow,” is how I started an essay on light, how sometimes it prematurely ends or is ended. I wrote, I was afraid of the appearance of truth. You are afraid of truth itself, my fiction instructor commented, which seemed to me both dramatic and necessarily cruel, and so I wrote back furiously until my eyes bled, you could have been a poet—
3I don’t indulge in the romance of it, I say, in repose, or response. You have to kill the thought that that was the great love of your life. As ever, we are sitting on a wall overlooking a river, smelling like libraries and moisturiser and Thai food. K offers me a cigarette, sees my face, then takes it back with a kind of mournfulness. In memory of Seedly, she says, then tosses it into the river so tenderly I forget the expanse before her, and after.
4Once, in a fit of rage, she threw a book at my head.
Don’t write about this, she said later, opaque as a burglar,
I forbid you to. Do you understand me at all?
5We don’t have to own each other, K says to me.
The story has died, and so have we.
We have never owned anything but each other, I say.
Fuck off, K says, laughing, so that I know,
reading Stag’s Leap in Furn el-Shebbik,
to invent details and untruths, books and
libraries, fights and fervencies, so that
the simple truth of it—that we fell out
of love with no one to blame—is erased.
6Everything we love becomes a myth eventually.
Christian Yeo is a writer based in Singapore. His work has been published in, amongst others, The Mays, Rusted Radishes, and Gaudy Boy’s New Singapore Poetries. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize, was runner-up for the Aryamati Poetry Prize, placed third for the National Poetry Competition, and has been shortlisted for the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, the Bridport Prize, and Sing Lit Station’s Manuscript Bootcamp. His work has been performed at the Lancaster and Singapore Poetry Festivals. He graduated with Double First Class Honours in Law from Cambridge. Find out more at christianyeo.com.
