Really Short Short Stories: The What's the Point, Again? Series

IA girl wakes up one morning with a swollen left eyelid, like from a mosquito bite - except it’s neither itchy nor painful. As the day wears on, the lid swells more and more, until the girl is unable to open her left eye and is forced to go about her daily chores with only one eye.

Soon, however, she finds herself having double vision - not seeing double, but double vision. She tries closing her right eye, and finds out, to her surprise and shock, she can still see with her left. Eventually, she figures out her left eye gives her the vision of what has already happened (be it two minutes ago or two years later), and her right what is currently happening.

At first, she is excited she can look into the future, but after a week, after she has seen everything that will and has happened, she grows more and more disillusioned and depressed. Inevitably, she begins to contemplate suicide.

However, seven days later, she wakes up with a healed left eyelid. She can only see the things that are currently happening now. As she goes about her life from that day onwards, she tries to do things that would surprise herself: because she now knows that whatever she does in and with her life, whether or not she gets answers and/or wiser, when her life ends, everything she does and is ends with her.



IIA young man falls in love with a girl he thinks is the most beautiful person with the most innate grace in the world. This girl has become his world, and he finds himself imagining a shared life with her. He is thrilled when she falls in love with him. They become the couple everybody envies and hopes to be.

Three years later, still blissfully and blessedly in love, they are planning their marriage. The week before the solemnization, out of curiosity and on their parents’ behest, they consulted a fortune teller - who turns out to be the harbinger of bad news: if and when they should marry (the fortune teller warns), they will be bounded to each other for life but will find their love and happiness and desire for each other completely vanished within the first year of their marriage.

Worried, the couple asks what could be done to remedy this, but the fortune teller tells them it is their destiny; and, try as they may, they cannot change it. As the couple walks away, the girl insists they not believe the fortune teller and get married anyway; the young man, however, wholeheartedly believes in the fortune teller’s words.

On the day of their solemnization, the young man does not turn up. Thus he manages to retain his love and desire for the girl for as long as he lives, but loses her love and desire forever. He dies a happily miserable man.



IIIOne afternoon, a young lady alights several bus stops away from home to buy slices of pie for her mother. Since the bakery is located along a long stretch of road well-known for good food, the girl decides to walk a little down the road to search for nasi lemak, which she suddenly has a craving for.

When she has walked the distance between two bus stops, she sees a shop that sells nasi lemak. However, she walks on, because she thinks it does not look too good - and also, there may be a store farther down the road that sells better nasi lemak. When she passes by the next bus stop, she finds another shop that offers nasi lemak, and yet again, she finds it wanting and walks on thinking there may be better nasi lemak down the road.

Finally, three bus stops and three nasi lemak stores later, she still hasn’t found the nasi lemak she craves, and is getting hungrier and more tired and weaker by the minute. Finally, she realizes she is only one bus stop away from the stop she usually alights to walk home - a walk that is the distance of about four bus stops.

Therefore the girl decides to walk all the way home, the hope of finding something to eat still burning, although less brightly. Unfortunately, all the eating places she passes then are closed. So, when she spots a small dry-provision store, she goes in and buys a bag of crisps.

When she finally gets home, she eats the crisps and finds they taste better than the nasi lemak she had craved.



IVA girl, who wishes to acquire every piece of knowledge about the universe known to man, one day gleans piece of knowledge she immediately regrets to possess: she can see more and much farther than she is able to comprehend.

She despairs about this fact for a long time, at the expense of time and her studies.

Then, it occurs to her that even if she should be killed by what she does not know, she would still die in the bliss of her own ignorance; and if she should die knowing with a clear knowledge of what has killed her, she would die in comprehension and awareness - but in any case, when she has died, what else will and can matter?

She lives to learn as much as she can, and dies having not learned more.



VA man vows to spend his life seeking the al-iksir of life - Immortality - and the Truth.

When he has found, not just one, but both, he is slaved the infinity of his immortality to searching for a way to die – and to forget.


End