A clean, well-lighted place.

Prompt I picked this week:

Write a piece of flash fiction about a case of mistaken identity. A stranger might be mistaken for an old friend, an outsider might be mistaken for a member of the community, or a person who has met someone a handful of times before may be confused for someone else.

I was on a trip to New York several years ago. It was for a friend’s wedding and I stayed in town for one week after that.

I had just gone through a brutal breakup right before the trip. A wedding wasn’t quite the event that’d excite me at that particular time. I tried not to make any association but still, the ceremony that officiated my friend’s love story felt like a magnifier of my own freshly failed attempt at it.

It was the first time I was in New York in summer. I didn’t know the city can be so agreeable in mid-June – sunny and fresh in the daytime, cool and breezy in the evening. Before that trip, I had only been in New York from late autumn to early spring and had known some of its worst temperament.

And there I was, after the wedding, left with my emotional jadedness in the perfect Manhattan summer. I had no plan for that week. I didn’t think I’d need one for New York. One day, I found myself wandering aimlessly in the Central Park. People looked very happy everywhere – couples having their wedding photos taken by the fountain, families boating on the lake, entertainers joggling at the center of a crowd, teenage girls in school uniforms selfie-ing in the best angles possible. I was immersed in the happiness of others. It was possible to feel happy by just witnessing happiness. Eventually, I lied down on the grass in a shaded corner, squinting at the blue cloudless sky. Everyone must have a story to tell about New York, a voice came upon me. I wondered what would be mine, if that was the case.

The next day, I woke up on the couch in my friend’s downtown apartment with a strong crave for a big meaty breakfast. My friend and her husband had left for work. I snoozed on the couch while swiping on Tinder.

In a few minutes, I matched with Andrew, a 48-year-old eye doctor on the profile. I asked if he would love to have breakfast with me.

An hour later, at an outdoor table of a restaurant near Union Square, I met Andrew. He had deep sepia eyes and a good physique. We started to exchange casual information about ourselves. I told him about the wedding, the breakup, and my sudden craving for sausages that morning. He told me he was from Boston, shared a flat in the city with his cousin, his last serious relationship was with a Korean, and anecdotes of his job as an eyeball repairman. Andrew was not a bad breakfast company.

We went out again one evening that week. It was the night of the NBA final game, Warriors vs Cavaliers. I joined him and his friends at a dive bar in the downtown. After the Cavaliers championed, we moved on with more bar-hopping and shared some edibles. The whole night we were laughing our heads off, yet most of it was a blur. It was a runway night. We opted in to an altered reality with a relative stranger just so we could opt out from our absolute reality, as far as the night could last.

When we came out of the last bar on the Lower East Side, too drunk to walk a straight line, it was a few hours until daylight. The street was dim and empty. A sense of void was taking over the hysterical joy.

We were a few steps away from a signal-controlled junction, not clear where was next. I took out the eyedrops that I carried with me and applied some to ease an acute dryness in my eyes. Andrew’s eyes lit up at the sight of that.

Is that the menthol type that gives your eyes a strong cooling sensation? He lisped.

Yeah? Aren’t all eyedrops supposed to make you feel like that? I lisped back, blinking my watery eyes. The menthol eyedrops were the only thing I ever used and they were the most popular type in the Hong Kong pharmacies.

Of course not! Only Japanese brands do that and it’s only sold in Asia! They don’t add menthol to eyedrops here.

Are you serious? I had no idea! I sounded more amazed than I intended to, like every drunk person.

I’ve always wanted to try it! Oh my god, can you give me some now? Andrew pled.

I will give this whole bottle to you as a gift. I said, amused by his exaggerated excitement.

Before I realized, Andrew already kneeled down beside me with his head tilted up, waiting for me to put in the eye drops for him. He wasn’t kidding when he said “now”. In the middle of the street, I held his forehead gently and pressed the eyedrops into his sockets. He started to make a growling sound from the minty coolness in his eyes, entertaining me with his little performance.

As we stayed in that posture, Andrew on his knees and me on my feet, facing each other, a cry broke the peace in the midnight street. “Yes! Just say Yes!”

We looked to the direction of the voice and saw this driver waiting at the junction sticking out most of his upper body and yelling at us. “Say Yes! Did you say Yes?!” Both Andrew and I halted for a moment, and burst into laughter at the same time. The driver seemed even happier as he saw us laughing hard. He held up one arm to “congratulate” us before he drove away.

At that moment, it occurred to me this was my New York story. It wasn’t quite what I would imagine for myself. But I enjoyed it all the same.

Prompt I picked this week:

Research an occupation that takes place in an unusual or interesting environment that many readers are unlikely to know much about. Then, write a character profile of a person who works in this place.

It’s Nicole’s most delicate enjoyment and sensitivity to be sitting in the treatment room. 15 years she’s been practising as a psychotherapist, she stills feels a subtle pressure at the very back of her chest when sitting opposite a patient. She can’t easily explain that, not to her colleagues, not to her friends. But deep down she knows it’s what attracted her to this line of work in the first place. The hurtful interests in humanity. The prospect of nudity between people’s minds.

She rents half a floor in an unimpressive commercial building in the downtown with some other therapists. The six of them share four therapy rooms. There’s a small reception desk where people enter, but no receptionist. Cards of different therapists quietly serve themselves on the desk. It’s part-time work for most of them there, same for Nicole. One of her own painting is hanging up in the hallway, where patients sit and wait. It’s a big oil painting of a Japanese vase she did many years go. It’s a painting in yellow color tone and she likes to think it brightens up the hallway a bit as people wait there. Nicole hasn’t painted anything for a long time. She is in a constant struggle of time in the past few years, ever since she became a mother.

She is seeing less than 10 groups of patients every week. She used to receive more patients when it was still just herself. It’s her most profitable job and she could use the ease with finance. But there is a fine-line to be kept as she tries to maintain a balance among different roles now. In her early 50s, Nicole is a psychotherapist, a university instructor, a volunteer psychologist with autistic children, and a single mother to a 7-year-old boy she adopted 5 years ago. Her therapy approach wouldn’t allow her to have too many regular patients. There are only so much space one can spare to take in the heaviness from other people’s lives and still keep themselves intact. As a mother, it’s more important now to ensure a main part of her is intact for her son.

There are different kinds of therapists in the world. Some takes it as a job that pays as if they are just dentists for people’s minds. Therapists like this can always manage to withhold themselves and keep a distinct distance between their professional lives and their personal ones. Nothing could possibly go wrong because they are barely truly interested in their patients. There’s another kind that are truly interested in their patients, but profoundly through an academic lens. Their minds are so centrally wired around the academic architecture of psychology that they take keen interests in every patient, not as a flesh human, but as a sample human in a lifelong experiment. Most of Nicole’s colleagues are these two types and she learned it from their weekly seminar discussions. She sometimes wishes she could go with either of them as they are easier approaches. But she can’t. Nicole takes interests in her patients in a way that she truly cares. Even when she doesn’t like some of her patients as a person, she still cares. It’s in her instinct to care. It’s something she cannot just switch off.

Nicole believes she is helping her patients. Or, it’s important for her to know she still believes that. As a therapist, she is skilled with her tools. As a person, she comes with the qualities that make a good therapist: approachable, trustworthy, empathetic, compassionate, a “healer”. Unlike some therapists, Nicole is never rushing the attribution, nor is she obsessed with the “break-throughs”. She has a way of controlling the tempo and at times she’d rather hold it when it’s obvious what is the next question to ask. Instead, she substitutes it with a short silence. A few seconds for the mind to just breathe. She does it as if she is a mechanic constantly fine-tuning the airflow in the room and most of the time, she knows she is in control.

But there are still times it would come to her sheer realisation that there’s so little she can do. She can make a husband and wife see the cause of their marital problems, she can’t salvage the wrecked ship. She can convince a young girl of her own lovability, she can’t find her a lover that she deserves. She can guide a pair of parents through their grieving, she can’t fill up the hole left by a lost child. From time to time, she is overwhelmed by the sense of helplessness that it aches.

In any case, she has deep affection for her treatment room, where stories of unrelated lives are told and unknowingly intersect with each other. She thinks of the treatment room as a “home out of home”, for herself, and everyone who ever entered it. When a session ends and the patient leaves, she lingers a little while in the treatment room, looks at the empty sofa and recalls what just happened there. She indulges herself with a moment of private softness and vulnerability. Then she knows it’s time to go home, where her beautiful boy awaits.

Prompt I picked this week:
Using the first-person plural, “we,” write a piece of flash fiction—no more than 500 words—about a fictional city or town. This city/town might be a slightly altered version of a real place or an entirely imagined place in which magical events are possible.

We arrive at the village house in the early afternoon. It’s a very hot summer day. Both Eric and I are fairly sweaty after the little uphill walk. Before that, it took us one hour on the bus and 40 minutes more on a private speed boat to reach this deserted island, where the owner of the house picked us up.

It is a two-story house in a pretty wrecked condition, but very spacious and in a good structure. There is a backyard, with a stone table and some stone benches at the far end of it, shaded under a big tree. They look like they’ve been for forgotten by the whole world. The whole house looks like it’s been forgotten by the whole world, and in some way, that might be the intention of it. A place exists only to be forgotten.

The island we’re at is one of the few little islands around the city that are either completely abandoned or half-deserted since the 80s, due to their small sizes and tricky locations. There are less than twenty households still living on it now. All aboriginal fishermen’s families with their own boats. I only heard of it — the moonlight island — for the first time when Eric told me about the house for rent he found online two weeks ago. It’s quite a romantic name for such an unknown island, I thought.

The owner is a middle-aged local guy, who inherited the house from his late farther two years ago. He lived in the house when he was young but now lives in the city. Take your time, I will take a walk nearby, he tells us and then descends into the woods behind the house. On our short hike, he told us the house was listed online in the past two years and had only had one tenant for six months. Every now and then there came in a viewing request from people like us. He’d receive them, show them around, and eventually never hear from them again. It doesn’t seem to bother him though. He talked about it as if he’s talking about one of his friend’s business.

So? what do you think? Eric breaks the silence after we have wandered round examining the huge house for about 15 minutes.

I love it, I say. It’d definitely take some work. But I could imagine us living here.

Me too, he said. We could have our separate writing areas on the upper level and a shared lounge for hanging out in the evening. Downstairs could be our music zone. You can have your piano there and I’ll have my recording system and drums at the other side. How does that sound?

I look at this Irish man in his late 30s, talking in all seriousness, with beads of sweat still hanging on the side of his face, and start to wonder if he’s any serious at all.

It’s the second time we meet. We talked about going somewhere remote on the weekend. Eric found this place and suggested we check it out. As a game, we’re pretending to be this artistic couple looking for live-in studio space. In fact, I don’t think the owner cares at all about our story. In reality, Eric is an editor in a publishing house and I work in marketing for a company helping to make rich people richer. We both do a bit of writing in our spare time.

It sounds lovely, I smile at him. I will not be the first one to call off this game.

We walk over into the backyard. I sit on one of the stone benches in the shade. Eric is pacing around. He looks back at the door where we exit and spots two big Chinese characters on the beam carved in faded reddish paint.  

What does this say? He points to the beam.

Lonely Light. I read-translate for him.

How wonderful, one murmurs.

How wonderful, one echoes.