That afternoon passed the way afternoons pass in an old person's house — slowly, filled with small sounds that occupied the space so that silence didn't have to be acknowledged directly.
Along swept leaves in the front yard. The sound of the broom was rhythmic, repeating, repeating, like a clock running without a destination. Angah hung clothes on the line out back, her voice drifting over occasionally — complaints about clothes that had come out wrinkled, about heat that wasn't strong enough, about small things of no importance that still needed to be said so the mouth had something to do. I wiped the dusty dining table with a damp cloth, each stroke leaving a dark streak on the cloth and releasing the smell of old dust into the air, a smell that had time inside it.
Tok sat in her rattan chair.
A hand fan moved slowly — forward, back, forward, back — with the rhythm of someone who had long stopped needing to think about how to fan themselves. Occasionally she looked at us. A small smile that needed no reason, a smile that existed because we existed.
But quiet.
The Tok I remembered was never quiet like this. The Tok I remembered was the first voice you heard from outside the gate — radio loud, stories nobody asked for, scolding the chickens that got into the kitchen, laughter that came from somewhere deep in the chest. The Tok I remembered filled a space the way someone does who doesn't realise they're filling it, the way someone who is comfortable with their own presence in the world fills it.
The Tok sitting in the rattan chair this afternoon filled the space differently.
In a way that left the space still empty.
---
"What did Tok eat earlier?" Along called from the kitchen, her voice light, trying to be light.
"Tok cooked just a little. Rice and egg." The answer came slowly, like someone recalling what they had done a few hours before and only now arranging it into a sentence.
"Aiya, why didn't you wait for us to arrive."
"You all were late…" Tok smiled faintly.
I lifted the lid of the pot on the stove. Rice still inside, half a pot, still a little steam rising when the lid came off. Then I looked at the plate rack on the wall.
Two plates on the upper rack.
Wet.
Not wet from just being washed and not yet dried — wet the way plates are wet when they've just been used, just rinsed, just set back in their place. I looked at them for a moment longer than I should have. One plate for Tok. The other for whom.
"Tok washed two plates just now?"
Tok looked up from her rattan chair. Her eyes found mine — briefly, two seconds — then dropped back to the hand fan in her grip.
"Hm?"
"Never mind."
I closed the pot again. For some reason I didn't want to continue that question, as though a part of my mind already knew the answer and had decided it was better not to know for certain.
---
Maghrib fell fast in the village — not like the city where day and night had a long grey gap between them, but like someone turning a page: light, then dark, without much negotiation. The sky outside the window changed colour in a time too brief for the eyes to prepare, and the cricket sound that had been there since the afternoon suddenly seemed twice as loud, as though the darkness had given them permission to speak fully.
Along switched on the living room light.
A dim yellow filled the space — not a light that illuminated so much as a light that revealed, that showed the corners invisible during daylight, that cast long shadows from the legs of chairs and tables onto the walls.
Angah sat cross-legged in front of the TV, thumb scrolling her phone screen with a movement that had become muscle memory rather than choice. "Signal is so slow. YouTube is buffering."
"Of course, it's the village," Along answered from the kitchen.
I lay on the wooden floor, hands behind my head, looking at the ceiling. The tiredness of the journey was only beginning to surface now, the kind of tiredness that waits for the body to stop moving before it arrives. The wood beneath me was cold through my clothes, a cold that came from below the floor, from the earth under the house that had never received direct sunlight.
From the kitchen, the sound of a tray.
Tok appeared with four cups on an old plastic tray, the cups clinking softly each time her steps made the tray tremble. She set the tray on the coffee table.
Along took one. Angah took one. I sat up and took one — heat spreading from the cup into my palm, the smell of thick tea too sweet, the way Tok had always made tea since we were small.
Tok took her fourth cup.
Then she set it beside the empty chair to her left.
Not on the table. Beside the chair. As though setting a drink for someone sitting there, whose hand wasn't quite long enough to reach the table.
I looked at Along.
Along looked at me.
Angah, who had been focused on her phone, slowly lowered the screen — she noticed too, without needing to be called, the way a person's body senses a shift in a room even when the eyes haven't seen the cause of it.
Tok sat down. Her hand nudged the cup slightly forward — a small, slow movement, the movement of someone offering a drink while saying, go on, don't be shy.
"Drink up… it's hot…"
Her voice was soft. Not the voice of someone talking to themselves. The voice of someone speaking to a person they were certain was there, waiting for an answer, their absence of response not surprising because they were already familiar with that kind of silence.
The hair on my arms rose.
The cup didn't move. The chair was empty. All logic said no one was there.
But the way Tok looked at that chair — patiently, warmly, the way someone looks at a person they love in silence — made that logic feel like something very far away and not particularly important.
Angah suddenly spoke. "Along, tomorrow let's clean out the storeroom. So much old stuff."
"Yeah, okay."
Two sentences. A new topic. The conversation moved forward like a boat rowing away from something floating in the water without wanting to look at what it was.
Everyone pretended to be normal.
And in that pretending, the fourth cup sat beside the empty chair, still steaming, still hot, waiting for a hand that wasn't there to take it.
---
Night grew later.
One by one the lights went out — the living room, then the hallway, leaving only the dim yellow kitchen light. We went to our rooms without many words, the way people do when they are done with a day and aren't sure what they want to carry with them into sleep.
My old room.
A wooden wardrobe with a door that wouldn't close properly unless you lifted it slightly while pushing. A small study desk with a pen holder that still held pens that had probably dried out years ago. An iron window frame rusted at its hinges, that when the wind was strong enough would sound — not loudly, patiently, the sound of something that had been there a long time and had long since learned to wait.
I lay down. Scrolled my phone briefly, signal coming and going, finally set it aside. Darkness. The sound of the fan I'd switched on for company. The sound of crickets outside that never stopped, never, as though it was the base sound of this village and all other sounds were guests.
I was almost asleep.
Almost — in the space between conscious and not, where thoughts begin walking without permission — when the sound came.
KREEKK.
Floorboard outside the room. Once, then silence. Then again — footsteps, slow, in the manner of someone who didn't want to be heard or someone whose feet were no longer strong enough to lift properly.
Drag. Drag.
Like old slippers whose soles had worn thin.
I opened my eyes to the dark ceiling. Still. Listening.
"Probably Tok…" I whispered to the ceiling. Logic. Tok always got up at night for water, I remembered that from childhood, that was a fact I could hold onto. I turned over, pulled the thin blanket to my shoulder, closed my eyes again.
Then the bracelet at my wrist felt warm.
Not hot. A specific warmth, a warmth with a source, a warmth that didn't come from my own body temperature. I opened my eyes. Raised my hand in the darkness — couldn't see anything, only the silhouette of my own hand, black against black. The bracelet felt warm beneath my fingers when I touched it.
"Just a feeling," I said quietly, not to anyone. To myself. To the room.
Pulled the blanket back. Tried to sleep.
---
KNOCK.
The window.
Once. Softly. Not the sound of a branch — branches don't sound like that, not precise, not a single knock. This was the sound of something that had made the decision to knock.
I went rigid on the mattress. Heart suddenly fast, the way the heart goes fast when the body knows something before the mind has time to understand what. Several seconds passed in thick silence.
Wind, probably. Must be a tree branch. I arranged those words in my mind carefully.
Then I noticed.
The window curtain was moving.
Slowly. Half an inch to the left, then back. As though something behind the cloth was breathing — in, out — or as though a hand was touching it from a side that shouldn't have had a side.
My fan wasn't pointed at the window. I knew that because I'd aimed it at the bed, at my face, not at the window.
And the wind from outside — I could hear it. I could hear the crickets, I could hear leaves brushing against each other somewhere out there. Wind existed outside. Wind did not exist in this room.
The bracelet grew warmer. Then abruptly cold — like someone blowing breath over hot water, a cold coming from above rather than below, a cold that had direction.
I looked at the ceiling for a long time.
In my mind, two versions of the world ran simultaneously: one version in which all of this had an explanation, in which I was too tired and had been thinking too much and the curtain had moved for reasons that would be clear tomorrow morning in sunlight. And another version that I didn't want to allow myself to fully enter, a version that had begun forming its edges in this darkness, a version that answered all the questions I didn't want to ask.
The footsteps outside the room had stopped long since.
Silence outside now — not empty silence, full silence, the silence of something that had arrived where it needed to be and was now standing still there.
I didn't move.
Minutes passed. Crickets kept sounding outside. The fan kept turning. This room was the same as it had been all along.
Finally, in an exhaustion stronger than fear, my eyes grew heavy.
Sleep came — with the bracelet cold at my wrist, with the curtain still again as though it had never moved, with the ceiling offering no answers to someone who had been staring at it too long.
---
But that sleep wasn't deep.
That sleep was thin like water over a mirror — you could see through it, you could see something beneath, but you couldn't be certain whether what you saw was a reflection or actual depth.
In that sleep — or at its edge, at the threshold between — I heard footsteps again.
This time slower. This time stopping outside my room.
I wanted to open my eyes. My body was heavy the way bodies are heavy in dreams, a heaviness that came not from outside but from within, as though I myself was holding myself back from waking because part of me knew — had already known since earlier — that there were things safer not to see directly.
My bedroom door was not locked.
I remembered that. I remembered not locking it because that old key hadn't worked for years.
The door handle didn't move.
The footsteps outside didn't move.
Everything held still in its place — me inside, something outside, the door between — in a balance that felt as though it could break with even the smallest thing.
Then the footsteps moved again. Drag, drag. Moving away. Heading toward the end of the hallway. Heading in the direction of the kitchen.
I didn't open the door. I didn't go down to check.
I lay with my eyes shut and hands gripping the edge of the mattress, and I told myself: Tok went to the kitchen for water. That's all. Tok went to the kitchen for water and tomorrow morning all of this will look very small in sunlight.
I repeated that until it became a mantra. Until it became background noise. Until it was loud enough in my head to drown out the other question that had been sitting at the edge for a long time, waiting for its turn to be asked.
---
Morning came the way mornings come in the village — suddenly and fully, sunlight that didn't ask permission coming through the gaps in the thin curtains directly onto my face, and sounds from the kitchen, and Angah's voice complaining about something, and all of it felt like hands pulling me back to a world that had names for everything.
I sat up at the edge of the bed.
Head heavy. Eyes swollen. Body as though it had never slept even though I knew I had — I remembered sleeping, I remembered the moment when consciousness became unconsciousness, but that sleep hadn't given what sleep was supposed to give.
From the kitchen, the smell of coffee. The sound of Along laughing at something Angah said. Tok coughing softly — a familiar sound, the sound of an old person in the morning, a sound I recognized.
I opened the bedroom door.
An ordinary hallway. Light coming in from the window at the far end. The same wooden floor, creaking in the same places as I stepped, the places I remembered from childhood, the places my feet remembered even when my mind had forgotten.
Nothing in this hallway.
Nothing I could point to and say: here. Here is where it was.
I walked to the kitchen. Sat in a chair. Accepted the cup of coffee Along held out without asking why my face looked the way it did. Listened to Angah complain. Watched Tok sit at the end of the table with her cup of tea, looking out the kitchen window at the backyard full of morning dew.
Normal. Everything so normal.
And I almost believed that — almost, within the distance of a few seconds — before my eyes dropped to my own wrist.
The bracelet still felt warm. Not hot. Not cold. A specific warmth, a warmth with memory inside it, a warmth that didn't come from the temperature of this morning.
A warmth that knew last night had happened.
I held the coffee cup with both hands and looked at the steam rising from its surface and said nothing to anyone.
Because if I said something — if I mentioned the footsteps last night, if I mentioned the curtain that moved, if I asked about the fourth cup Tok had placed beside the empty chair yesterday evening — then it would become real in a different way.
And I wasn't ready for it to become real in that way.
Not yet.
—