Short fiction: A couple, slowly falling out of love, hopes for a baby to save their marriage

It was the darkest of gunpowder grey skies when we reached the toll plaza, perhaps an indication of what I should expect from making this journey. The lady in the booth shrugged when I asked if the traffic jam on the North-South Highway continued all the way to Bukit Mertajam.

“Find out for yourself, lah.” With a gloved hand, she handed me the change after topping up my Touch & Go card and slid shut the window.

We couldn’t do anything else, I suppose. After all, we’d been driving north of Kuala Lumpur for close to five hours.

Shoving the RM5 into the breast pocket of my batik shirt, I put the gear into Drive when the barrier was raised. Our car moved ahead only to come to a standstill 100 metres away when the traffic was forced to merge into two lanes on this country road.

“I told you not to make a big issue about the delay,” Malini quipped. “You knew, when we started that this was going to be a long drive. Luckily, I brought enough food so that we won’t need to stop unnecessarily.”

If she hadn’t delayed our departure by two hours because of the Zoom meeting with her staff that she’d forgotten to reschedule,...

Read more