The coffeeshop speakers were playing an old ballad too softly to compete with traffic. I chose the seat facing the road so I could watch for the bus — a habit from years of guessing arrival times instead of trusting apps when the network stutters. My phone lay screen-down beside the saucer. The teh was sweet the way I asked for it: siu dai, hot, with the spoon left in because I stir slower than most.
The tone arrived without warning — not the MRT announcement kind, the kind that makes heads turn in unison. A man at the next table looked up from his rice and said, “Wah, quite loud ah.” His friend did not answer. Across the road, a group near the bus stop tilted their ears toward the avenue. The block numbered 248 is not visible from where I sat, but sound travels cleanly down those corridors of flats.
I am telling you what I heard, not what I verified. I did not walk over. My bus was due. My mother expects a call when I am late, and I already had one foot in the mental schedule of home. From the coffeeshop I caught pulses of light between buildings — blue-red, blue-red — and the stutter of engines idling hard. Radios crackled from somewhere I could not see. A rider in a green jacket stopped at the junction, looked left, looked right, then u-turned with the caution of someone who has learned not to guess.
Inside, the uncle cleared a plate and asked nobody in particular, “Accident is it?” Nobody confirmed. WhatsApp groups on my phone stayed a mosaic of question marks and second-hand sentences — “near 248,” “avoid the back lane,” “police already there” — none of it from sources I would repeat as truth. I sipped teh that had cooled and tasted more bitter at the bottom, the way it always does when you wait too long between stirs.
What stays with me is the choreography of strangers pausing together. The auntie wiping tables slowed her arm mid-circle. A child asked why the song on the radio stopped — it had not; we had just stopped listening. I pressed record on my voice memo app for ten seconds, then deleted it. Some audio feels like borrowing panic you do not own. I kept the moment instead as sentences I would type later.
Two-forty-eight on Avenue 2, Choa Chu Kang — eight-fifty-five on a Monday — I can say that coordinate honestly. I can say the street felt tight, like a throat holding a word back. I cannot say what happened inside the tape the sirens drew around. I did not see faces worth naming. I did not hear confessions. I heard urgency without narrative, and that is a strange thing to carry home on a bus you almost missed because you were listening too hard.
When the tones thinned out, the coffeeshop exhaled. Orders resumed. The ballad returned to being background. My 302 appeared late, as if it too had been held somewhere. I boarded, found a seat by the window, and watched the flats slide past — lit windows, flickering TVs, laundry on poles like flags for ordinary life. I thought about how this blog is supposed to be my voice, not the neighbourhood's rumour mill. So I will not invent details to fill gaps. Gaps are part of the record too.
At Bukit Panjang I transferred and walked the last stretch under trees buzzing with insects. Home smelled of cumin and soap — dinner and laundry, both in progress. I told my mother I was fine. I did not mention the sirens until she asked why I looked distracted. Even then I said only, “Something happening near CCK, I think. Not sure.” She nodded the way mothers nod when they have learned the difference between drama and danger without being told which is which.
Now it is typed. Static on the avenue, then a long pause — that is the honest headline my brain kept repeating. If a crime occurred near Block 248, it stayed outside the frame of my table and my bus window; I will not dress rumour in certainty. If you were closer and know more, I am not competing with your account. This is my distance: a coffeeshop table, a cup of teh, a bus almost missed, and flat 248 existing in sound rather than sight. Singapore keeps moving when the sirens leave. I am one person who noticed the gap between noise and knowing, and decided to say it out loud without pretending I was closer than I was.