Creative Writing exercise: write a story within ten minutes of hearing the prompt.
Chio Tee went rock-climbing in her cheong sam.
No, this wasn't rock-climbing, this was bouldering – just like her colleagues have done, in Thailand.
But this time, she was stranded on an island in the Indonesian archipelago. She looked at her son beside her, who had just produced some faeces in his baby-blue pants; the poor infant had been born blind. He was howling.
In her hair was still the hibiscus flower her husband had given her, when he had tearfully waved goodbye to her at the ship-port. Where was her husband when she needed him?
Trying to massage the sense of panic that was rising within her, she chewed on the oily piece of bak kwa that she had packed.
Far away from the coastline, the ship's captain looked around him. He had told Chio Tee to jump overboard, together with her son. The ship, named The Unsinkable Giant, was going down, and he was going down with her. There was no way out of this disaster.
A quiet despair engulfed the captain from the depth of his bowels.
Around the captain were treasures from all over the world: caviar from Russia, cheese from Switzerland, and raw salmon sashimi from Japan. All of these were sinking down, down, down into the ocean, never to be seen by humankind, ever again.
- fin
Credits:
Appreciating Felix Cheong for hosting the session on Creative Writing, and for delivering the prompt: the soundtrack named “Jungle Drums”, from the 1990 film by Wong Kar Wai: 'Days of being wild'.
Kudos to Isabel Ng, Vivian Teoh and Janice Tan for venue support.