The Long Laundry Poles

Our apartment block in the new town of Jurong East was one of the first to rise from the swampland, a lonely concrete sentinel against the sky. We lived on the seventh floor, in a corner unit that my father, a dockworker, had won in the first housing ballot. To make the most of the narrow space, he had installed an outer gate of iron bars at the end of the corridor, carving out a makeshift terrace where my mother kept her potted herbs and a clothesline. Inside, a collapsible accordion gate guarded the main door, and beyond that, the living room doubled as our dining area, with a Formica table that folded down between meals.

Two bedrooms branched off to the left, their windows looking out over the endless rows of identical blocks, and past them was the kitchen, a cramped strip with a single window that spanned the entire back wall. My mother, a woman of habit and superstition, would roll up the bamboo blinds every laundry day, leaning far out to hang our clothes on long bamboo poles that she slid through the metal hooks fixed to the wall. I remember watching the poles tremble under the weight of wet sheets, and how the wind would sometimes lift them like wings, making my heart leap. But my mother never flinched. She would hum old Hokkien folk songs, her eyes fixed on the horizon, as if she were feeding the sky itself.

The trouble began on a Tuesday, during the northeast monsoon. My father had gone to sea, as he often did, and my mother had taken in piecework from a garment factory to make ends meet. I was eleven, home from school with a fever, lying on the sofa in the living room. Through the open kitchen door, I saw my mother struggle with a heavy bundle of blankets, her face flushed. She hoisted the first pole out, the blanket catching the wind like a sail, and for a moment she seemed to be wrestling a living thing. Then she came back for the second blanket, and that was when I heard it: a low, guttural laugh from outside, just beneath the window.

I called out to her, but the wind swallowed my voice. She leaned out, and I saw her body go rigid. When she turned, her face was pale, and she refused to look at me. ‘Just a cat,’ she said, but she crossed herself, a gesture I had never seen her make. That night, she insisted on closing the window, even though the kitchen grew stifling. She also brought out her old joss sticks, burning them in the living room until the air was thick with smoke.

The next laundry day, I was home again, having recovered. My mother had asked a neighbor to help her with the blankets, but the neighbor, a cheerful woman from the floor below, quickly made an excuse and left. So it was just the two of us. My mother put me in the kitchen to watch, telling me to call out if I saw anything odd. She leaned out with the first pole, and I saw the blanket flutter. Then I heard the laugh again, closer this time, and the blanket twisted in a way that had nothing to do with the wind. It twisted around the pole, tightening like a wet rope, and my mother pulled with a grunt. As she did, I saw a hand—gray, pale, with long fingers—emerge from the blanket, brushing her arm. She screamed and let go. The pole clattered to the ground outside, seven floors down, and the blanket drifted away like a ghost.

My mother did not speak of it, but that night she took out her sewing kit and, with shaking hands, sewed a small red pouch filled with salt and dried chilies, which she tied to the window latch. ‘For protection,’ she said. But the laughter continued, from the corridor, from the plumbing, from the hollow space behind the kitchen cabinets. I began to hear it in my dreams, a sound like a baby crying mixed with something else, something gleeful.

Two weeks later, my father returned. He was a practical man, skeptical of such things, but he saw the fear in my mother’s eyes. He inspected the window, the poles, the laundry area, and found nothing. ‘It’s your imagination,’ he said. But the next morning, as he was shaving at the bathroom sink, he saw the reflection of a figure in the mirror—a thin, dark shape standing behind him. He spun around, but there was nothing. He dismissed it as a trick of the light, but when he came out, my mother was standing in the kitchen doorway, her face ashen, holding the red pouch. She had seen it too, in the window’s reflection.

From then on, the presence became bolder. Laundry would be found scattered on the floor, as if yanked from the poles. The accordion gate would rattle at night, a metallic whisper that made sleep impossible. And always, the low laugh, sometimes near the window, sometimes in the walls. My mother stopped doing laundry altogether, letting it pile up in a basket that sat in the corner, a growing monument to our shared dread.

One evening, unable to bear the silence, I crept into the kitchen alone, determined to see the source of the laughter. I peered out the window, past the fluttering curtains, and down at the street below. There was nothing. But then, in the glass of the window, I saw a reflection of the kitchen behind me, and in that reflection, on the floor, was a pair of bare feet. I turned around, but the floor was empty. The laugh came from directly behind me, so close I could feel a cold breath on my neck. I ran out of the kitchen, screaming, and my father came running. He grabbed a cleaver and, for the first time, I saw true fear in his eyes.

That night, we decided we could no longer stay. The next morning, we would call for removal to another block, any block, even a back lane. But when morning came, the laundry basket was empty. The clothes were hung out on the poles, as if we had never stopped doing laundry. And on the window sill was a small, gray handprint, freshly made.

We left that day, taking nothing with us but our bags. As we walked down the corridor, I looked back at the flat, and through the open kitchen window, I saw a figure—tall, emaciated, with a smile that went too far—lean out, holding one of our bamboo poles like a scepter. It waved at me, slowly, as if in farewell. The next day, when the new tenants moved in, they found the flat clean but strangely cold. They also found a pile of bones in the kitchen, wrapped in an old blanket, and a single bamboo pole that would never stay put, always sliding out of its hooks, as if trying to reach for something.

My mother would never speak of it, but she kept that red pouch with her until she died. And in my dreams, I still hear the laughter, and I see the bamboo pole, and I know that it is not finished with us. But I also know that we left a piece of ourselves there, in that flat, and that piece will always be reaching out, like a long laundry pole, toward the living.