In 1982, Auntie Lim, hair pinned tight under a

faded floral kerchief, slips a folded photo of a

quiet engineer into her niece’s palm as they

queue for curry puff at the Tiong Bahru hawker

centre. The boy’s father once saved her

husband’s life during the Japanese Occupation —

a debt written in rice, not ink. No names spoken.

Just a date: Friday, 8pm, Block 47, seventh

floor landing.

The HDB block still smells of wet concrete and

burnt coconut oil from last night’s kueh lapis.

No lifts. Stairs creak with the ghosts of NS

boys carrying rice sacks home from the army. The

seventh floor never stays empty — not since ’68,

when a bride jumped after her groom vanished

during the riots, leaving only a red veil and a

halfeaten kueh salat on the floor.

Auntie Lim doesn’t believe in spirits. She

believes in karmic arithmetic. One life saved,

one daughter matched. She lights three joss

sticks behind the toilet, whispers to the

ancestors, and leaves a packet of dried longan

on the windowsill. The rule: no one dares sit on

the seventhfloor bench after 7pm. Not since the

last girl who did never came down — just a

slipper, dangling from the railing, still tied

with a red thread.

On Friday, the niece arrives in her best

pinafore, clutching a thermos of bandung. The

air is thick with the scent of wet laundry and

incense from the nearby Taoist shrine. She sits.

The bench is warm. A man appears — thin, silent,

wearing a shirt from the 1940s, collar frayed,

eyes hollow like a photo left too long in the

sun. He doesn’t speak. He places a folded piece

of paper on her lap. Inside: a single photograph

of her mother, age 12, holding a kite she never

flew. The kite’s string? Red thread. The same

shade as the veil.

She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t scream. She takes

the photo. Walks down. At the ground floor, she

stops. Hands it to Auntie Lim. No words. Just

the weight of a loss buried under survival: her

mother’s voice, gone since the ’57 floods, never

named, never mourned.

Auntie Lim doesn’t ask. She folds the photo into

her prayer purse. That night, she burns a new

joss stick — not for the dead, but for the

living who still carry ghosts in their pockets.

The seventhfloor bench stays empty now. But

sometimes, when the wind blows right through the

HDB corridor, you can hear the faintest rustle —

like a kite string, finally, being let go.

The next morning, the niece applies for overseas

study. No one knows why. Auntie Lim doesn’t

press. She just leaves a plate of kueh pie tee

on the doorstep — sweet, sour, just enough heat

to make you remember.