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face. At my expression, she clamps a hand over my mouth and makes a shushing noise. It is appropriate that she arrives in such garb, as she often commented that she would join the sisterhood after my death; naïvely, optimistically, I assumed this would occur many many years from now. It is not her lack of hair that strikes me most of all, but her missing rings; I have never see her so naked.
    “But how did you escape?” I whisper.
    “It not matter,” she says and kisses me hard. Her lips are familiar and strange, changed inexplicably with her shaven head and nun’s robes. I say her name and we embrace and weep quietly, for our situation, for our impending separation, for her continued survival in this cruel world. I grip her and never want to let her go. My beautiful, fiercely intelligent, wildly inventive true love. “I soon lose you,” she breathes.
    I can think of nothing I can say, I am lost in my sorrow. I hold her, frightened and joyous at once. She will live on, she will grow old, she will continue to be. “I shall always be with you,” I say.
    “Yes,” she says. “I know.”
    She reaches beneath her robes and unstraps a senapang kenangan , but no model I have ever seen. It is smaller, the size of a Derringer, and adorned with her aesthetic touch, flourished with knobs and curlicues, brass filigrees and inlaid thaumaturgical symbols. It is a work of art as much as a functional tool.
    “Improved,” she says. “We take seven years worth.”
    And all at once, her plan becomes apparent.
    “Yes,” I say. “Do it. Quickly.”
    She presses the barrel of the memory gun to my temple. How will it feel, to empty my mind, seven years of my memories, all of our experiences together, every drop? The experience can only leave me a simpleton, the extraction of so much of myself, but my doomed physical form will not soon require a mind to fuel it. After she ingests me, consumes me, incorporates me into herself, will some part of me continue to live within the mind of my lover, even as my body rots in the ground? To exist as a spirit, momok , nestled within the mind of my life’s love, to travel to her new monastery, to gain peace and enlightenment, to become one with the world ... there are worse fates to embrace.
    As she squeezes the trigger, I briefly think to ask her about the locked wooden cabinet in our home, and whether she retrieved the contents inside before it all burned down, but it matters not. In a moment, I will not remember the answer anyway.

Ikan Berbudi (Wise Fish)
    Mrs Singh raised the segmented metal gate on her fish head curry stall with a raucous clatter, prompting several sparrows to alight from their feast of kaya toast crumbs on a nearby table and erupt upward into the hawker centre’s metal rafters. Block 117 Aljunied Market and Food Centre was sparsely populated at 10 a.m., most of the breakfast diners having already finished eating, and the lunch rush yet to begin. She appreciated the calm and the quiet that came with this time of the morning, a time of reflection and of gathering herself for the onslaught of customers to come. Her stall was not nearly so famous as those on “Curry Row” in Little India, like Muthu's Curry or Banana Leaf Apolo, but her portion of the hawker centre filled to overflowing every single weekday, and she’d done so well last year that she was able to buy her elder son Anand and his new wife their very own HDB flat.
    She pushed the gate on its curved track all the way up, turned on the stall’s fluorescent lights and oscillating fan, and looked to the far corner of the stall, where, on a shelf above the stainless steel sink, away from the heat of her gas stove, rested a glass aquarium. Inside the aquarium, lazily treading water, was a grand red snapper with pointed teeth and auspicious markings, and it perked up as she approached. She stroked the side of the aquarium with her index finger and the fish waggled its fins.
    “Good morning, fish,” she said