This is a story about stories—the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others. What actually transpires in Ba-Doom? A group of acquaintances sit in a bar and exchange stories of love. Strictly speaking, there is no plot. Action is replaced with conversation, which is only as substantial as language is—not very. Speech is ephemeral, like the memories it briefly resurrects, like Johan’s childhood encounter with love, like the line of condensate Mateo draws with his finger, like the names from past lives each character recalls, rising and evaporating...

Listen to the sploosh! recording of “Ba-Doom” by Daryl Qilin Yam, a short story from Be Your Own Bae, published by Epigram Books (@epigrambooks).

Author Bio: Daryl Qilin Yam (b. 1991) is a writer, editor and arts organiser from Singapore. He co-founded the literary charity Sing Lit Station, and serves as the managing editor of its publishing arm AFTERIMAGE. He is the award-nominated author of two novels, a novella and the bestselling short story collection Be Your Own Bae (2024).

Read 'after/tastes' by Dinh Cao Tue at sploosh.sg/magazine/issue-4-toast/

Read 'An Expository of Small Loves' by Sher Ting Chim at sploosh.sg/magazine/issue-4-toast/

Read 'campbell's mushroom chicken soup' by Felicia Zhuang at sploosh.sg/magazine/issue-4-toast/

Read 'dubstep with chinese grandmas' by Crispin Rodrigues at sploosh.sg/magazine/issue-4-toast/

Read 'kacang pool' by Euginia Tan at sploosh.sg/magazine/issue-4-toast/

Read 'Morning Ritual' by Yan An Tan at sploosh.sg/magazine/issue-4-toast/

Read 'motel chronicles' by Shaik Aqeel at sploosh.sg/magazine/issue-4-toast/.

“The orange blooms glowed in the green room like a lamp.”

At 4:30 am, a lonely boy creeps into the room of a lonely man. He does this every morning from December 15 to December 20, six days from his childhood he will never forget, six days during which he felt furthest from loneliness, sharing those quiet hours with a stranger from Korea.

Yeo Wei Wei’s “4:30” is a short story based on an award-winning film of the same name by local filmmaker Royston Tan. The film (and Yeo’s response) traces the relationship between Xiao Wu, a reserved eleven-year-old boy who lives alone in a public apartment, and Jung, an alcoholic Korean man who has come to Singapore with the intention of ending his life. Taking the film as its point of departure, Yeo’s “4:30” remains faithful to the original plot while shuffling the narrative sequence to form a story in ten parts. She cleverly layers details and motifs that not only surprise us when they make a reappearance, but that also offer us more poetic ways of looking at and listening to the film.

Where pictures fail, words step in. What I appreciated most of all from Yeo’s imaginative transcreation is the insight it offers into Xiao Wu’s perspective—his backstory and his life after, his inner thoughts and his perception of reality. In the film, Xiao Wu is a boy of few words; in fact, his (and Jung’s) silence is often superimposed upon by a melancholy guitar theme. Yeo teases words out of the silence and those melancholy notes. How else can we imagine Xiao Wu’s room as a forest of fragile trees? And how else can the orange blooms glow—so magically—like a lamp?

Notes On Paper is an alternative audio tour of ‘| | on paper’, an experimental ‘residency’ that culminates in a showcase of 20 sets of 4 pieces of A4 paper transformed by 20 artists. Writers Laura Jane Lee and Yap Hao Yang were invited to respond to the showcase by reimagining their encounters with the various works as six haibuns, a Japanese literary form first used in travel writing. Each haibun wanders into the artists’ different paper-worlds and traverses their lines, creases, and folds, simultaneously speculating about the journeys the artists took and musing on incidental themes and images. These notes on paper offer an alternative way of viewing, feeling, and dreaming about the works in the showcase—those former sheets of white.