On the covered walkway near home that leads to the train station, there were often young people busking — solo guitarists and singers, or small bands of three or four. There were also the old-school uncles with their portable speakers belting out nostalgic Cantopop. Shy as I am, I find it embarrassing to watch anyone perform in public, let alone perform myself. Whether the music was good or bad, I’d always walk past with my head down and never dare drop a single coin.

One evening I was on my way home from the train station. I don’t know whether the carriage had been too crowded or the air too stale, but I stepped off feeling dizzy. It had started raining, which deepened my panic. I made it to the walkway, and my steps started to falter. There were three groups performing along the walkway, their sounds blending and bouncing off the walls. I pressed my hands over my ears and pushed through the crowd, barely making it to the far end — only to find I’d forgotten my umbrella. Desperate to get away, I stepped out into the rain anyway, into the dim street.

In a corner no one would notice, a girl stood in a lemon-yellow raincoat, holding a matching lemon-yellow guitar, singing in a high, sharp voice. The yellow was an odd colour for a raincoat, and over her left eye she wore a cloth eyepatch. My legs seemed to catch on something and I stopped in front of her. She was summoning me, it seemed — I had no choice but to respond. I noticed she was singing in a strange language I didn’t understand. Stranger still: I understood every word.

She was singing in a voice barely able to breathe, a song about being unable to breathe. Toward the end, she was gasping, her voice ragged, her face going purple, swaying left and right as if she might collapse. I rushed forward to steady her and got her sitting on the edge of a nearby planter. She pointed at her backpack on the ground; I picked it up — it was impossibly heavy. Inside was a giant canister that looked like a fire extinguisher, with a tube connected to the top. She took the tube and sucked from it hard. After a moment her colour came back and she recovered.

It was only then I noticed I’d been standing in the rain the whole time and was soaked through. The girl stood up, took off her raincoat, and put it on me. Under it she was wearing a deep blue sailor-style school uniform. Up close I could see she was a girl in her teens — small, with a full, lively face, her uncovered right eye sharp and bright. She began speaking in that language I didn’t know but understood completely, telling me she was from Lemon Star and had come to bring a message to the people of Earth. She had studied many methods and learned that Earthlings liked a form of street performance called busking — expressing thoughts through song. She had learned this form, hoping to communicate directly with people. But no Earthlings could understand the language of Lemon Star, so no matter how hard she sang until her voice gave out, she got no response. Being an outsider, she couldn’t claim a good spot, and ended up singing in an unnoticed corner. She also added that I was her first and only audience.

I was soaked through — the raincoat was too late to help — and I was shivering continuously. But the girl clearly needed me, and I didn’t want to leave. I asked: “Why are you singing a song about oxygen deprivation? Even if someone could understand, it’s not exactly an appealing subject.” The girl adjusted her eyepatch and said: “Because Lemon Star is a planet running out of oxygen. My people have been dying one by one. We will soon cease to exist.” I was shocked. “So you came to ask Earth for help?” She waved it away and said: “No, it’s too late for us. There’s nothing you can do. I came to warn you not to become like Lemon Star.” I was even more baffled: “You mean Earth will also die?” She said matter-of-factly: “No planet survives forever. All of them end the same way.” I asked: “So what’s your advice?” She pointed to the canister and said: “Stock up on oxygen tanks.” I was disheartened. “Why so negative?” She disagreed firmly: “Oxygen tanks are a great invention.” She took another pull from the tube as if tasting something delicious and nutritious, and looked satisfied.

I pushed back: “Isn’t there something more active than making oxygen tanks?” The girl suddenly laughed: “You actually said something optimistic! That’s rare.” I said: “What do you mean? You don’t know me.” She narrowed her one eye: “I’ve known you for a long time. Because you’re the same kind of person as me.” I thought she was getting stranger and stranger, and said: “How could I be anything like you? We’re completely opposite.” She looked mysterious and said: “Opposites are the same. You’re from Lemon Star too. You’re my reflection.” This person was clearly either a con artist or mentally unwell. I started to regret stopping.

I stood up to take off the raincoat and leave. Then a wave of dizziness knocked me straight to the ground. Now she was the one helping me up, sitting me down on the planter. She looked at me with one concerned eye and said: “Looks like you’re running out of oxygen too. Here — breathe.” She held the tube out to my lips. I didn’t hesitate for a second. Like someone who has waited far too long for a drop of rain, I breathed in, hard and deep. A freshness entered me, slowly reviving the parts that had dried up and died. I felt full of life; my mind cleared. The girl smiled with satisfaction. She said: “I think my reason for coming to Earth has now been fulfilled. I’ve found my successor. Remember — you are a child of Lemon Star. The mission of reviving Lemon Star is now yours.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but a happiness rose up inside me. I breathed in the oxygen greedily, and with each breath the girl’s body seemed to shrink slightly, like a deflating balloon. At the very end, she disappeared entirely, leaving only a folded sailor uniform on the ground, and the white eyepatch. I folded the uniform and put it in the backpack, picked up the eyepatch, put it over my left eye, and pulled the raincoat hood up. I picked up the lemon-yellow guitar, strummed a few chords, and then, in that language I didn’t know but understood, standing in the rainy street, I began to sing the song about oxygen.

For Sanketsu Shōjo Sayuri (1996–2024), forever in our hearts.

SF’s Strange Ordinary was originally published in Chinese in ebook format in 2025. Following it’s serialization in English translation, an English ebook version will be published. If you want to buy the Chinese version (USD 7.99), please click the link below:

Buy SF's Strange Ordinary (Chinese)

Translated from the Chinese original with Claude

Picture generated with Midjourney

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Her name wasn’t Lei, but her real name has been eaten, ___ rather than leaving gaps every time I mention her, I’ll use Lei to refer to her.

I had just started ___, could make no friends, and spent every ___ alone in the library. One dusk I came out and walked along the pond’s bank toward the train station. On the bridge I spotted a group of koi swimming leisurely below, and leaned on the railing to ___ for a while. Koi gather where people feed them, ___ and closing their ___— like black holes ___ and shutting — which is a little unsettling. I was __ to leave when I noticed someone not far away also leaning on the railing, ___ the fish.

She was a woman, more mature-looking than me — probably older. She ___: “Can you guess why those fish keep ___ their ___?” I was caught off guard and took a moment before ___: “They’re hungry?” She pressed her lips together, disagreed, and ___: “They want to talk.” “Talk?” I ___. “Fish can’t talk.” She ___: “Fish want to talk, but the words won’t come out. Who doesn’t want to talk? Anything ___ life wants to talk.” I disagreed: “I can go a whole ___ without talking, even a whole week, and I’m fine. Why do we need to talk? Is there anyone worth talking to? Isn’t it better not to?” She laughed and ___: “Aren’t you the one talking a lot right now?” Caught, I had nothing to ___ — and she ___, in a voice like rippling ___: “You must want someone to talk to after all. You can talk to me! I ___ talking. But I have one condition: after each conversation, you have to give me a word to eat.” I didn’t understand. She smiled and ___: “Just think of me as a word-eater.”

That ___ I talked ___ Lei until after dark. At the end she asked for a word; since I wasn’t sure how it worked, she ___: “Just give me something you won’t miss — a particle or filler word.” I gave her the character ___ (a written equivalent of the spoken particle ___). She told me to press against my chest ___ my ___, pull it out, hold it on my palm, and she picked it up ___ her ___ and put it in her ___, chewing as if it were something delicious before swallowing. I thought it was a funny game — until I discovered that afterwards, in speech and writing, I no longer had access to that character. It didn’t affect meaning, but it removed a tone, a nuance. For someone already flat and affectless in conversation, I became even more wooden.

Even ___, I kept coming ___ to the pond’s bank to talk with Lei whenever I could. I don’t know what it was, but as soon as I saw her I became a different person — no longer the quiet, wooden girl, but chattering freely, talking ___ everything and nothing, pouring it all out. And Lei listened with close attention, and at the end she ate the word I gave her with obvious satisfaction. At first she accepted less common words, but her requests gradually escalated. She ___: “I’m not picky, but if you keep ___ me words that don’t really matter to you, that’s not very generous of you.” I felt she had a point, ___ I pulled out the common conjunction ___ as a sign of good faith. She ate ___ with great pleasure and declared it especially delicious.

The way Lei savoured a good word made me keep offering more. Our conversations brought me more and more comfort. But my word-stock was shrinking. I concentrated on non-essential adjectives. Soon I could no longer say this dress is very ___, this cake is very ___, this flower is very ___, this person is very ___. This was manageable — some meanings could be expressed indirectly, through comparison. It was a test of my language skills.

Then Lei ___: “Names would be nice too.” Nouns are endless; there should be no shortage of ones I’d be willing to give. But I couldn’t feed Lei rubbish. I chose the nouns I treasured most — abstract values, concrete things. (Forgive me for not listing them; the relevant words have been eaten.) Lei isn’t greedy or unreasonable — she was careful ___ my interests, declined pronouns, and refused function words, ___ I could still form logical sentences. (Time, ___, cause and effect, relations — those she left alone.) I learned to find words that were meaningful, that tasted good to her, but that I could also express other ways. ___ as you read this now, you probably won’t notice how impoverished my vocabulary has become.

I won’t claim that many words are superfluous and forgettable. The opposite — exchanging them with Lei showed me how precious each lost word is. And this is something you only know after you’ve lost it. When there’s a word you can never ___ again, you finally understand its value. The ___ is, words you can no longer ___ gradually fade from ___, until it’s as if they never existed — and the value you understood becomes moot. In the end, I don’t know what I’ve lost. And the dilemma, such as it was, resolves itself.

What Lei really wanted was verbs. As a connoisseur of words, she considered verbs the most alive, most vigorous thing there is. Nouns are ingredients, adjectives are seasoning, function words are steps and matching — but verbs are the cooking itself. Without verbs, language is dead; not even worth arguing ___ on paper. I offered Lei everything I was willing to do for her, all of it expressed through verbs, for her to eat one by one — until I could barely move, could perform almost no action. In language, I was paralysed.

Winter turned to spring; the lotus in the pond was beginning to ___, and the koi were lively, leaping out of the ___ surface. I talked with Lei on the bridge once more, then pressed my chest and drew out the most important word I’d been holding there all along. It was the ultimate action-word of emotional declaration. Lei’s face lit up. She took it carefully, placed it in her ___, and tasted it slowly, a look of happiness on her face. I didn’t realise until then that the word was also Lei’s original name — a noun.

___ ate herself and vanished, and I was left unable to ___ anyone. I have only broken, incomplete words remaining. Some sentences I can no longer ___ at all. Though probably no one will notice.

SF’s Strange Ordinary was originally published in Chinese in ebook format in 2025. Following it’s serialization in English translation, an English ebook version will be published. If you want to buy the Chinese version (USD 7.99), please click the link below:

Buy SF's Strange Ordinary (Chinese)

Translated from the Chinese original with Claude

Picture generated with Midjourney

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After a fairly mild cold, I lost my sense of smell. At first I thought it was just a blocked nose, but when the congestion cleared, I still couldn’t smell anything. The feeling is hard to describe. Losing sight or hearing — even touch (like when a tooth’s been numbed) — is imaginable. But losing smell? On the surface nothing looks wrong, and it seems to have almost no impact on daily life, yet there’s this indefinable sense of something missing.

And when you lose smell, you lose taste with it — everything really does become flavourless. I’m not a picky eater; I usually eat whatever’s in front of me, so I’d thought the loss wouldn’t affect me much. But when you experience eating something with no flavour at all — not even the flavour of wax, because there’s no flavour of wax either — it’s deeply unsettling. Appetite on one side (no satisfaction in eating) and an empty stomach on the other (no sense of having eaten anything) left me subsisting on air and nothing. A kind of immortal asceticism for someone whose appetite was already poor.

Smell is a crucial survival tool for animals — for finding food, for sensing danger, it’s often faster and more accurate than other senses. In humans the need to hunt for food or detect threats has diminished, so the instinct has weakened. Losing smell seems to cause no immediate danger, just the loss of certain pleasures: good food, flowers. But it also spares you from certain horrors: body odour, waste. For someone with my cleanliness habits, perhaps it isn’t all loss.

About a month into life as a smell-free creature, I was taking a bus home from the city one evening and had to walk through a pedestrian tunnel after getting off. The tunnel was empty, some of the lights broken, dim and stale. I quickened my pace, and halfway through, I felt something fluid rushing toward me. Not wind — the tunnel was stifling. Something startled me; I drew a sharp breath — and suddenly realised it was a smell. I looked around: nothing nearby that could produce a strong scent. I walked quickly out of the tunnel and checked the area — no flowering plants nearby. Besides, the local flora had already finished blooming for the year. I breathed deeply again: nothing. I looked back at the dark tunnel. Something seemed to be retreating.

I assumed it had been a momentary illusion and didn’t investigate. Two days later, crossing the elevated walkway nearby, I was hit again by a smell in the open air — out of nowhere. No one smoking nearby, just a constant stream of traffic roaring past below with exhaust fumes. But there in the middle of the walkway, my nose was full of something pleasant. I was transfixed, standing there in a state approaching rapture. Then it vanished as suddenly as it had come, and I plunged back into the void of nothingness.

This pattern continued: smell ambushing me in increasingly close quarters. At first outdoors, then on public transport or in building corridors, then in restaurants, even in public bathrooms. When it happened during a meal, I didn’t taste the food — instead something entered through smell and gave me a faint, elusive pleasure. I knew this wasn’t my sense of smell returning. Something else was visiting. But it came and went like the wind, untouchable. When I tried to grasp what it was, a word came to mind: 匂. Yes. It was Nioi.

Nioi is a Japanese-invented Chinese character, pronounced におい (nioi). It appears in the final section of The Tale of Genji, the “Uji Ten Chapters”. The protagonist, Kaoru, is as his name suggests — physically beautiful and always accompanied by a natural fragrance. His friend, Nioumiya, is the same; the difference being that Kaoru is devoted in love while Nioumiya is a romantic wanderer. The character 匂 means scent and smell — not necessarily pleasant.

My instinct told me that the thing visiting me was Nioi, and that it had a will of its own. I had evidence. Once, when I was walking my Shiba Inu Wu-lei, he picked up on Nioi’s approach and barked a warning at it. A dog’s nose is absolutely trustworthy, but I couldn’t have Wu-lei with me at all times.

Nioi exploited my vulnerable, smell-less state — appearing out of nowhere to get my attention, then vanishing, like playing hide-and-seek. It always gave me just a taste before hiding again, keeping me tantalizingly close and frustratingly distant. The delight and satisfaction I’d felt at first gradually turned into irritation and anger. Once, ambushed in a lift, I spoke out loud: “If you’re not going to give me back my sense of smell, stop playing games with me. I can’t see you but I know you’re there. Don’t think invisibility gives you free rein. You’re just a smell. You’re nothing.”

After that, Nioi went quiet for a while and I went on living without desire or expectation. But thinking that would make Nioi give up — that was a serious mistake. Looking back, I should have noticed the signs, especially Wu-lei’s unusual behaviour at home. I should have known that something like Nioi can’t be stopped by ordinary doors and windows. But I was careless.

That night, I’d just got into bed with the light still on when I felt something creep in and wrap itself around me. The room filled with an intoxicating scent — almost liquid in its density, thick enough to drown in. I covered my nose; the fragrance seemed to come from my own body. Then I realised it was coming from inside my nostrils. It had invaded me. I coughed and thrashed, but there was no shaking off something invisible. No — it wasn’t Nioi anymore. It was Kaoru. Not just scent, but fragrance itself. Gradually I stopped resisting, let my whole body relax, lay back, opened myself, and breathed in that intoxicating perfume freely, greedily.

When I woke up the next morning, the fragrance was gone — like a dream. But I could smell the pillow. I could smell my own skin. I got up, went to the bathroom — shower gel, toothpaste, disinfectant... all the familiar smells came back, one after another. But Nioi was gone.

To celebrate my recovered sense of smell, Dad said he’d take me out for a buffet. But for some reason I felt empty and let down. In the MTR carriage packed with sweaty bodies, I suppressed the urge to vomit. When the doors opened I fled onto the platform and breathed hard, but inhaled only the damp, stale smell of underground pipes baked by summer heat. The assault on my nose made tears come. Dad asked worriedly what was wrong. I couldn’t speak. I just thought: please let me catch another cold soon.

SF’s Strange Ordinary was originally published in Chinese in ebook format in 2025. Following it’s serialization in English translation, an English ebook version will be published. If you want to buy the Chinese version (USD 7.99), please click the link below:

Buy SF's Strange Ordinary (Chinese)

Translated from the Chinese original with Claude

Picture generated with Midjourney

Subscribe now

Share 愛虛構 Fiction Passion

A senior classmate of mine worked at a café and said it was a good spot — quiet, good for reading and writing. I had nothing to do during the day, so I tried it. The café also had lots of jigsaw puzzles to pass the time. I’ve had a fear of jigsaw puzzles since childhood — the sight of those jagged cut lines makes me uncomfortable. But they were the café…

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That morning I opened my eyes and for a moment had no idea where I was, and my head ached as if it belonged to someone else. When I finally managed to get up, I saw it was ten o’clock. I normally sleep badly and usually wake around five or six in the morning. Sleeping this dead-to-the-world late had never happened before.

I also discovered I reeked of al…

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The last time I ended up in Wui was in Secondary Four. For a while I was terrified of going to school and kept skipping. Even when I did sit through class, nothing got through to me. I couldn’t follow the topics my classmates talked about, and sometimes I’d end up being punished for things I hadn’t done. But someone had to be punished, and it happened t…

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Just after the pandemic ended, I decided I couldn’t keep sitting at home and made up my mind to find work. A senior from my old department put me forward for a teaching assistant position. The school still required masks, so I was reminded to wear one.

When I arrived at the school office — during the gap between morning break and lunch — I was about to e…

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For a while I used to have lunch at a Japanese restaurant regularly. I’m not picky about food and I don’t eat much — I normally leave half a meal untouched, and it was no different there. The reason I became a regular wasn’t the food; it was Maan.

The first time I went in, the girl at the door greeting customers was completely ordinary-looking, totally u…

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I met Pun in the second year of secondary school. That morning on the way to school, not far from the gate, a girl fell over right beside me — scraped her elbow and knee. I just stood there, not because I didn’t want to help, but because I’ve always been terrible with strangers, let alone touching someone I don’t know. In the end I forced myself to crou…

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For a while, I wasn’t doing well mentally and was spending most of my time at home recovering. Every day my dad would nudge me to go for a walk in the nearby park, saying it would be good for me. At first I didn’t want to go — I’d wander around half-heartedly and come back feeling no better. It was always either too cold or too hot outside, and I’d rath…

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The first time I noticed Jok was on a warm evening. I was sitting at my desk by the window reading, when I casually pushed back a strand of hair. The clip near my temple slipped loose, bounced lightly off the desk, and disappeared from sight. I crouched down and searched every corner of the floor — nothing. At the exact moment the clip vanished, I heard…

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The Ordinary and the Strange

All the stories in this book were first published in the fanzine Oi Hui-kau — Fiction Passion, roughly one per month starting from June 19, 2024. During the same period I was also writing SF Girl’s Diary, a record of daily life with my sisters — over four hundred thousand characters, now published as a separate volume. Both a…

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Hello, World! 🥰

I’m Ng Heng-sun, the President of the Fiction Passion Secret Society. 😎

We are a collective of story-driven souls who came together to create the doujinshi magazine, 愛虛構 Fiction Passion. Our founding team includes myself, Lui Ting-yam, Lai Sun-fei, and Wu Ani. 🐵🐯🦊🦄

What We Do Our heart beats for fiction. We publish everything from sho…

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