There’s a small party in a two-story house furnished with midcentury teak, warmly lit, located on the outskirts of a city with a tropical climate. The guests are foreign dignitaries, optometrists, and architects with their own firms—and because it is (somehow) not raining, they all drift in-and-out, holding fermented cherries submerged in dark liqueurs.

It’s the best party anyone there had been to for quite a while, but the host is ready for it to end.

When the last guest—short, velvet jacket—finally leaves, the host sighs, shimmies, surveys her rooms of smooth surfaces littered with orange peels and oyster shells (ah! there’s the pearl earring his new girlfriend was looking for!), then walks to the window to peep onto her garden, its shallow koi pond of fish flipping their funny little tails, a damp breeze blowing the tall grasses a guest once compared to those sat beside the Nile (such a lovey-dovey!). She also listens to the frogs, but stops herself from searching for where those slimy croakers hide themselves this time. Oh, and the moon—a very crisp, very crescent moon—is embarrassed not to be covered by any clouds.

Now what? Well: she sighs again, finds the glass she thinks is hers stood there beside an old atlas open to a topographical map of Singapore (who the hell…), then—dark drink in hand—sits on her pinkish, well-stuffed suede couch to turn on a television housed in a mahogany cabinet.

World news, muted (just how she likes it). The familiar man with his familiarly wrinkled tie looks at her with a coy smile before transforming into a cement building which crumbles; then someone wearing a camouflaged hat; then a child with a wet wound where a left leg should be.

Commercial: a small girl pilots a yellow bike, smiling while holding an impenetrable pineapple.

Three minutes later the screen switches to a camera encircling a jetfighter sat on an aircraft carrier, pauses, then slowly encircles it again. The host—whose ex-husband worked (still works?) as a bridge engineer—sinks back into her pinkish couch, considering the intelligent look of that plane, that tower, that radar dish: How is it things can so quickly appear alert and discerning? Is it stone grey, maroon, magenta? Is it thinness, simplicity, proportion? Is it power? Certainty? Why do planetariums look smarter than aquariums? Why do the cars her guests drove home look more rational than their drivers? Why are there so many—wait (!)…wasn’t that kid on the screen dead?

Another switch—this time to someone standing in a monsoon—so the host retires upstairs to close Venetian blinds, loosen a silver ring, fold up a turquoise shawl, slip off a black dress, drop red lace, wash with cold water, then dive (in one Olympian swoop) amongst cream-white sheets.

All this for what? Well: first she listens to the trumpeting frogs; then she rolls, twists; then she stops to stare at moonlight streaked in perfect parallel lines across the ceiling.

• Brock Riggins