by Tan Shu Min.
Runner-up, Penang Monthly Short Story Prize 2025.
I. The Preparation
In George Town, they used to say that the broth from Auntie Choo’s stall on Lebuh Campbell could wake the dead.
Broth boiled thick with prawn shells from night to morning, laced with sambal so fragrant the crows circled the zinc roof. Her Tomyam wasn’t a dish—it was a duet. Every bowl forged by hands fluent in fire, blistered, steady, moving like rosary beads. Her mother sang as she hawked, voice slicing through steam—throaty at dawn, biting by midday. The soup answered in kind: sambal hissing, chili oil spitting back, staccato in sync. Shirley listened like an overture. When the broth crooned low, it craved anchovy. When the garlic cracked, the rite began.
The monsoon came the year her mother turned sixty-one. Her hands, once sure, were weathered by long hours and little rest. She stirred air instead of soup. Left the gas running. Burnt the shallots black. Her voice grew hoarse.
Shirley filled the silence the only way she knew how: clanking pots loud, scraping the ladle until the pot screamed. She stirred the broth as her mother had—three times, clockwise, always clockwise—but the broth stayed mute.
The regulars still came, rehearsed in nods, coins, slurps—as if they didn’t taste the
thinning soul, the threadbare soup. Even their neighbouring hawker, Mr Khoo, offered a polite smile now and then.
At night, Shirley found her mother on the floor, humming to the cauldron like a swaddled child. She traced its rusted rim, whispering recipes Shirley couldn’t catch. Some nights she spoke riddles—the shrimp must bleed, then the broth shall breathe. Other nights, she said nothing at all.
