The Disappearance
Poetry
The Disappearance (Interior: Exit Row, Somewhere Over the Pacific) There was a boy on the flight, maybe six, maybe seven. He pounded his fists against the window with the force of something ancient— something terrified, something true. "Ada bom!" he screamed. "Ada bom di pesawat!" There is a bomb. There is a bomb on the plane. His mother wrapped her arms around him like a shield that didn’t believe itself. The flight attendants froze, mouths half-open, eyes darting. Someone whispered, "Is this a game?" But no one moved. Passengers put in earbuds, closed their eyes like saints surrendering to air. I couldn’t. I watched him. His fists hammering glass, his mouth open like a siren swallowing its own sound. And for one perfect, collapsing moment, I believed him. Believed he knew. Believed he remembered— the Malaysian flight that vanished, the names pulled under mid-prayer. As if the ocean had teeth. As if it still fed on secrets and sound. Years later, I saw him again—only in a dream. The boy, same fists, same scream. Only this time, the window cracked. Only this time, I woke up sweating in an airport lounge in Taipei. A rain delay. A silence thick as tarmac. I checked my phone. One unread message. From a friend. One line: “She’s dead.” She died. Or overdosed. Or maybe someone shot her. No one ever confirmed it. She just . . . stopped replying. Her name flickered across a shared contact sheet. Then was gone. I found out in a group thread for some post-production pickup. Someone said she missed a shoot in Bali. Someone else said they found a girl in a red skirt face down near a ferry port in Lombok. No ID. Just eyeliner and a half-torn call sheet. The kind we all pretended not to keep. I didn’t go back. Didn’t ask questions. I just watched the message scroll out of sight like end credits in a film I’d never seen. They were still editing the sex scene then. Trying to colour-grade the sweat. I said it wouldn’t make the cut. But I knew it would. She said once on the roof in Surabaya, that when she died she wanted no funeral, just someone to delete her Instagram and leave her name off the final export. I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything. Except keep her in the script— like a landmine buried in the timeline, waiting for someone else to step on her name. — Hong Kong, China (March 2019)
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