Fiction

Flying Saucers and Sad Songs

The Quarantine Diaries, Part Three

Hengtee Lim (Snippets)
Human Parts
Published in
6 min readDec 17, 2020

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A masked woman standing beneath a flowering tree.
Photo courtesy of the author.

This is part of a series of short stories. To read them all, head here.

When the virus put the city into lockdown, I got hit in the back of the head by a flying CD case. I don’t know where it came from, but it hurt. I suppose I could have been more careful, but who expects a CD to come hurtling through the sky, you know?

I was on my way to the local coffee shop when it happened. I just wanted to pick up some coffee beans, head home, and make a cup of coffee. I didn’t plan to stay out long. We were in the middle of a pandemic, after all. I just never expected to turn up at the coffee shop with a swollen head, either.

“What happened to you?” my friend said.

“Would you believe I got hit in the head by a flying CD?”

My friend looked behind me as a CD case came crashing to the ground. It shattered on the pavement, and we watched as a lone CD rolled off into the distance.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I would.”

I got my coffee beans but decided to wait at the coffee shop for a while. At least until the rain stopped.

My friend said the CDs came every morning. He said they were probably getting launched from…

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Hengtee Lim (Snippets)
Human Parts

Fragments of the everyday in Tokyo, as written by Hengtee Lim.