The Neighbour's Tale Numero Uno BY -D-

if you've forgotten, my stories now takes place in a small housing community somewhere near Bukit Sebanging (i said at the base, but i may be lying) in Kampung..... well somewhere along Jalan Muara. the vague info is there for privacy reasons.

this one from one of the neighbours. during our first six months here, in our current home, not a lot people lived nearby. excluding us, there were three other houses that were occupied; one of which was owned by a single man, a bachelor, if you may. one other important detail to this tale, is, if you've forgotten, that our house is located at the dead end of the simpang which makes up the housing community. as you reach the end of the road, to your right, is my humble abode, and to your left, a lone lamp post, that never lit up until it got fixed many months later. finally, in front of you is the dead end, which consisted of a "wall" of tall grass reaching up to your knee where the concrete pavement ends. beyond that, the vast, grassy field mentioned in my previous story.

as you'd guess, night time was pretty dark right around that dead end area save for the lights from our gates. it wasn't out of the norm for you to drive up to the dead end, and catch a glimpse of a cat's glowing eyes right outside the area where your car's headlights are shining on, before it runs into the "wall" of grass and into the field. anyway, one night, our neighbour, the bachelor, decided to invite a bunch of friends to his crib to hang out. as usual, when your friend just moved into a new home, you sometimes tend to get a bit lost. such was the case for one of his buddies, who made a wrong turn (or rather none at all). this took place way past 1 am, and as luck would have it, our amah forgot to turn on the gate's lights.

so, our neighbour's friend was heading towards the dead end, which was very dark at this point. now, i mentioned cats in the previous paragraph, but this guy, not so fortunate. as the area where his headlights were shining on were about to move up to the wall of grass, he caught a glimpse of what appeared to be the back of a naked little boy running, away from the car, through the grass and into the field.... at the dead of night. what shook him even more was that he also got a short glimpse of the "boy's" foot which was caught by his headlights; it had a VERY pale complexion. took him a little while to snap out of it, get to his friend's place, tell them what happened, and planned never to hang out there past midnight again. and it took months later for us to hear this story, as we made our neighborhood visits during Raya (see what i did there?)

Selamat Hari Raya, kiddos.