The Hollow Dream
The city is tall and clean. The towers rise sharp against a white sky, their edges straight enough to cut a finger on, and there is no dirt anywhere, not in the gutters, not on the steps, not at the base of the walls where dirt always gathers. The plaza is wide enough to lose a bus in. The tiles are pale and ribbed, and they are cool through the soles of her feet.
At the centre of the plaza stands a figure lit from inside. The light comes out through its seams, through the gaps at its neck and wrists, and under the light something dark moves. It coils the way wet hair moves in a drain, slow, feeling for the way out.
She crosses toward it. Halfway over, one tile under her left foot sounds different. Lower. A small give, like a step on a hollow stair. She stops, lifts her foot, sets it back down. It sinks a finger’s width, then slides sideways into the dark like a drawer.
Then the carpark. Concrete pillars, yellow lines, the smell of wet cement. Water comes up through the floor drain at the far end, quiet at first, then a sheet across the bay. It reaches her ankles. Then her knees. The cars begin to lift, slowly, the way boats lift at a berth when the tide turns. Nobody runs. A man in a grey polo stands by a pillar and watches the water with his hands in his pockets. The water is warm. Too warm. That is the wrong detail.
A small curly dog swims past her toward the ramp, head up, unhurried. He knows where the ramp goes.
The ceiling fan arrives first, its tick at every turn, tick, tick, then the weight of the blanket across her shins, then the pillow under her cheek, damp at one corner. Amandha does not move. She does not open her eyes. Somewhere to her right the phone is on the bedside table, and she can feel where it is the way a tongue finds a missing tooth. She leaves it where it is.
Come up too fast and it goes.
So she walks it back. Warm water, rising. The dog’s head going ahead of her. The carpark, the ramp, the cars lifting. The tile that gave, and the drawer that opened. The plaza, the ribbed tiles, the white sky. The light coming out through the seams of the figure. She walks backwards through all of it, slowly.
Then the flat arrives in pieces. Water running in the kitchen, the tap turned hard, then the sound of it cut off. Her mother’s radio, a man reading the thirty-three degrees and thundery in the afternoon. The fan’s tick. The phone on the bedside table gives one buzz against the wood, then another, then stops. It is not David. He hasn’t called. It could be the agent about the keys, or Christine on the other side of the world, awake in the middle of her own day.
The buzz does not pull her hand. She keeps her hand under the blanket.
One piece goes anyway. The leader’s face. She had it a moment ago, lit from inside, and now there is only the light where a face should be. She feels for it and finds the edge of nothing.
She opens her eyes.
Grey-blue light comes through the blind. Thursday. The room is ordinary: the wardrobe door, the rail with her blouse on it, the two monitors dark on the desk. On the floor by the bed, in the orthopaedic bed with the raised grey edge, Yogi is asleep on his side. His back legs are going, paws paddling at the foam, his whiskers twitching with the effort. He is swimming. Amandha lies still and watches him until the paddling slows, then stops, and his breath comes long and even through his nose.
She reaches over and takes the notebook from the bedside table, the pen clipped to its cover. She does not turn on the lamp. She writes in the order it came back, which is backwards.
Carpark. Flooded. Warm.
She keeps writing, smaller, lower on the page. Dog swims toward ramp. Doesn’t hurry. Tile gave, slid sideways. Plaza. Light in the chest, lit from inside. Dark under it, coiling. Then, after a gap where the pen stays on the paper longer than it should: his face, gone.
She closes the notebook and sets it on her knee. The kettle starts in the kitchen, a thin rising whine, and she gets up to meet it.
The kitchen is bright already, the window letting in the flat white light of a Bishan morning. Her mother has the kopi going, the sweet smell of condensed milk and the bitter smell of the grounds, and the kopi sits on the counter in its glass with a saucer on top. Her mother’s radio is on the windowsill, tuned to the news. Yogi’s breakfast is in his bowl by the fridge, lightly cooked pork mince and pumpkin mashed with the powder she mixes in twice a week. He is already standing over it, not eating, waiting for her to sit down first.
Amandha puts the notebook on the table next to the kopi. She sits.
Then she opens the notebook and flips the pages back. The entries are older here, in pen and in pencil, some dated, some not. Months of it. The handwriting is loose in some places and tight in others.
The first one back is three weeks old. A girl from a village, barefoot, a flower on her shoulder that nobody else could see.
Below it, in the same night’s ink: Same girl again. The flower has moved. It was sitting on the skin at first. Now it is under it, dark, blooming outward one petal at a time. She keeps her sleeve down over it and laughs where everyone else laughs, and every time she laughs, another petal opens.
Then a gap, then a Tuesday: The girl at the well. She carries the water the way they taught her, tips it into the jar without spilling, says good morning to the aunties one by one. While they tell her steady girl, good girl, the flower turns toward the voices. Nobody sees it turn.
A tower with no dirt on it.
Lift doors that open onto water. Flat water, level with the corridor floor. It does not spill.
Two pages of nothing, then a run that goes on for days, the handwriting smaller each night. The function. The whole village came and they said how well she turned out, how smooth. She stood with her hands folded and her face felt smooth as a tile, it fit, and under the sleeve the flower opened and opened. In the dream, if one of them had seen it, it would have stopped.
The next night is the broken one. It is not coming for her from anywhere. Nothing brought it. It grows out of her, on the nice days, on the clapping, on all the years of her being fine, it grows because she and the line stops mid-word, and the pen pressed hard enough here that the grooves of it run into the next page. Nothing after. Two nights of nothing.
Then the line about the light, crossed out so hard the pen went through the page: they keep the light on so nobody checks the corners.
And on the last page of the run, a drawing, a rough ring of pillars, and under it, underlined twice, ramp.
She reads them in a row, one after the other. The kopi goes cold beside the notebook.
“You didn’t sleep?”
Her mother stands at the sink with a tea towel over one shoulder, looking at her over the top of her reading glasses.
“I slept,” Amandha says. “I just went for a swim in my sleep. Very efficient. No need for a gym membership.”
Her mother clicks her tongue. “Swim where? Your room got aircon, not a pool.”
“A carpark,” Amandha says. Then, flatly: “The water kept coming up, Ma. It was too warm.”
Her mother turns back to the sink. “Aiyah. That drain at Block 2 always flood one. Eat already? Have some porridge before you go out, you look like you didn’t eat last night also.”
“I’m getting the keys today.”
“Which keys?”
“Mine,” Amandha says. “The flat.”
Her mother turns off the tap and dries her hands on the towel, slowly, one finger at a time. She does not say anything about it. She puts the porridge on the table.
On the way back past the bedroom door, Amandha glances in. The two monitors are dark. Under the left one, the small red standby light is burning, steady. The walkthrough is still open on the screen behind the black, paused at a frame of a pale knight, one foot lifted, the second Watcher waiting just outside the picture. She doesn’t go in. She steps into the bathroom and closes the door.
She takes the car because of Yogi. He has a seat in the back and he stands in it until she tells him down, then turns two circles and folds himself in with his chin on the edge. She threads the clip between his front legs and he puts one paw on her wrist while she presses it home, patient about it.
The drive takes half an hour anyway, down Braddell, under the flyover, behind a lorry the whole way. The aircon takes three junctions to bring the temperature inside down from oven to merely warm, and Yogi’s nose works the entire distance.
The agent is waiting below the block, in the shade of the lift lobby, a woman with a lanyard and a folder, one heel against the wall.
“Hi, Amandha? I’m Jaslyn. Jerome asked me to pass you the keys.” She has the keys out already, two on a red rubber band. “Gate and door. Gate key is the brass one. If the latch gives you trouble, push up a bit before you turn, ok. Your IC ah?” She looks at it, hands it back, and the keys are warm from her pocket when she puts them into Amandha’s hand.
“So you moving in yourself, or you thinking of renting out?”
Amandha puts the keys in her pocket first. Then she says, “I’ll think about it. I’ll let you know next week sometime.”
“Ok, no rush. SP already under your name, so everything’s yours already. Anything just message, I have to go, another viewing.” And she is gone up the stairs, reading her phone, the folder already open to the next page.
The gate key is the brass one. The latch gives her trouble, and she pushes up a bit before she turns, and it turns.
The smell comes out ahead of her. Not paint, nothing new in it at all. Camphor, and old cooking, and the closed-up air of a flat that has been shut for weeks with the windows latched. Someone’s years. The someone has been removed and the years stayed.
The living room tiles are the old kind, cream with brown flecks, matte along the path from the door to the kitchen where feet polished them for thirty years, glossy at the edges where nobody walked. On the wall, a paler rectangle where a cabinet stood, and the filled screw holes gone slightly the wrong colour, each one. Above the door, the tape ghosts of a poster keeping its outline on the paint. A plastic hook by the light switch with a rubber band still on it.
She stands in the doorway with the keys still in her hand and holds the door wide.
Yogi goes in ahead of her.
He walks across the living room without sniffing anything, his nails clacking on the tiles, and turns into the corridor. He stops at the second bedroom door, which is closed, and pushes it open with his nose. He walks in and sits down in the corner by the window, where a bed would go, and looks out at the blank wall.
Amandha stands in the living room with the keys still in her hand. She does not follow him. She does not call his name. She lifts her phone and starts taking photographs.
The empty rooms, one after another. The living room from the door, the window grille in its square of light. The kitchen wall. The bathroom. The first bedroom, corners squared to the frame. The second bedroom, the window, the blind not yet installed. She holds the phone steady, moves slowly, takes each picture twice.
Later, on the bench by the lift, she scrolls back through the photos on the phone. Thirty-one of them, the tiles and the grille and the bare walls, the square of light moving across the floor from frame to frame as the sun shifted outside.
In one of the bedroom frames, low down near the skirting, Yogi is sitting up in the corner. He has turned his head toward the lens. His eyes are open, dark and steady, looking straight into the camera.
That night the house is dark by ten except for the strip of light under her parents’ door and the red standby light under her left monitor, burning steady. She is in bed with the phone on her knees. She has been through the photos once already, all thirty-one, the way you eat a meal you have no appetite for.
Then she opens ChatGPT the way you open the fridge when you have already eaten.
She types: “i keep having this recurring dream. there is a girl and she has a dark flower under the skin on her shoulder. nobody in the dream can see it. it has been coming back for months. what does it mean”
She means to add that it is getting bigger. Her thumb comes off the screen instead. She sends it as it is.
The reply comes fast, the little dots, then the words folding up onto the screen.
“Thanks for sharing something so personal with me. Recurring dreams can feel vivid and unsettling, and it’s completely understandable to want to understand what they might mean.
Here are a few ways a dream like this is often interpreted:
Something growing beneath the surface. Flowers in dreams commonly symbolize growth or renewal. A flower blooming under the skin, visible only to you, may point to a feeling, a change, or a part of yourself that you have not yet shared with those around you.
The unseen flower. The detail that no one else can see it could reflect a private inner experience, something that feels very real to you even if it is hidden from others.
The shoulder. Shoulders are often associated with burdens and responsibilities.
A few gentle suggestions:
- Keep a dream journal. Even a few words upon waking can help you notice patterns over time.
- Pay attention to how you feel in the dream. Calm, afraid, curious? The emotional tone can matter as much as the imagery.
- If vivid dreams are affecting your sleep, a wind-down routine in the evening can help.
Would you like to explore what was happening in your life when the dream first started?”
She reads it twice. The second time she can hear the fan the whole way through, tick, tick, working away at the ceiling.
She types back: it’s not a burden. Her thumb hovers over the send. She deletes it, letter by letter, back to the empty box.
In the empty box the cursor blinks, patient, and she watches it until the screen dims on its own.
The phone lights up on her knees.
David. New Message. She taps the screen and reads the message.
You were right about the caregiver. Coffee on me. When are you free?
She thinks of what she said to him, five days ago. I’ll let you know. She never did. He never chased. She looks at the message for a while.
Saturday morning. There’s something I want to show you.
The reply comes in under a minute. Ok. I’ll send you the address.
Another message arrives. She looks at it. Then she puts the phone down on the blanket, screen up, and leaves it there.