Hammock Snapshots are short flash fiction pieces, accompanied by an original illustration that aim to capture a moment, a feeling or a fragment of something without the pressures of longform writing. The series began on Instagram and now also features on our site.

Some say a crow's cawing marks the arrival of visitors; others see their departed ancestors in them. All the crow knows is that a lake of white rice unfailingly appears upon this window-sill every morning. In a city of ghost lakes, this very much is real, never to vanish. The crow sips from a pool of multiple longings; in return, it leaves behind a single rice grain every day.

The betel-nut vine emerges from the reincarnated paint pot, a shimmering green caravan voyaging to the sky. The metal grille leaves gaze yearningly, knowing they can only go so far, resigned to their imprisoned fate. Sometimes, they whisper to the crow and ask if they could borrow its glossy black wings. But the crow pays no heed and the leaves must content themselves with the smell of the wind and clouds it brings in its wake, the closest they will ever come to the sky.

And the bicycle meanwhile contemplates its existence, staring up at the window which resembles an upside-down house. In all its years, it has leaned against a coconut white, then new leaf-green, and now a peach-blue wall. Will it still be around the next time the house changes its colours? Sometimes, it dreams that the house no longer exists and there is no one left in the world except the window and the bicycle. And the window is now a house, sheltering homeless memories which have nowhere else to go.