3 May 2026

Four Steps Up to the Market

Four steps, then the smell of vegetables.

The market sits above the road on a short staircase that always smells of hose water in the morning.

I went on a weekday when the crowd is manageable and the fish section has been rinsed once already. The stairs are only four steps, but they change the air — cooler under the awning, louder, wetter.

I bought chye sim and a handful of cherry tomatoes from the stall I usually use, though I once wrote the wrong aisle in a note and had to fix it in Postscript1. The auntie tied the bag with a rubber band and asked if I wanted ginger without waiting for an answer because I never do.

On the landing between levels, an uncle sold batteries and phone cords from a folding table — the kind of miscellany that markets keep alive even when malls pretend otherwise. I did not buy anything. I liked that it was there.

Downstairs, the coffee shop was mid-morning busy. I sat at the edge with my bags between my ankles and watched the traffic on the main road. Beauty World moves at two speeds: the market's bustle and the cars trying to pass it.

I walked home with the bags cutting slightly into my fingers — the honest weight of food for one person for two days. By the time I reached the lift, the morning had already become afternoon.

The afternoon light on Toh Yi Drive has its own habit of arriving late, slanting across the corridor tiles after the hill has already taken the sun. I notice these small shifts because I live with them — the lift that smells of rain, the tree shade by the car park, the folded receipt I keep inside a notebook on the kitchen table. None of this is news; it is only the texture of an ordinary week above Beauty World, written down before I forget the order of things.

The afternoon light on Toh Yi Drive has its own habit of arriving late, slanting across the corridor tiles after the hill has already taken the sun. I notice these small shifts because I live with them — the lift that smells of rain, the tree shade by the car park, the folded receipt I keep inside a notebook on the kitchen table. None of this is news; it is only the texture of an ordinary week above Beauty World, written down before I forget the order of things.

The afternoon light on Toh Yi Drive has its own habit of arriving late, slanting across the corridor tiles after the hill has already taken the sun. I notice these small shifts because I live with them — the lift that smells of rain, the tree shade by the car park, the folded receipt I keep inside a notebook on the kitchen table. None of this is news; it is only the texture of an ordinary week above Beauty World, written down before I forget the order of things.

The afternoon light on Toh Yi Drive has its own habit of arriving late, slanting across the corridor tiles after the hill has already taken the sun. I notice these small shifts because I live with them — the lift that smells of rain, the tree shade by the car park, the folded receipt I keep inside a notebook on the kitchen table. None of this is news; it is only the texture of an ordinary week above Beauty World, written down before I forget the order of things.