We get out of Donna’s glossy midnight-blue BMW. The air is filled with spikes. It’s not supposed to be cold in the tropics but tonight is special. We’ve finally done what we’ve been threatening to do since we were teenagers. Poor Anwar. He’s just the in-between person in this, if you ask me, but the judge will say he’s the victim and the cause.

Donna lifts the cradle out of the back seat and throws it against a large dark tree. “That’s what you get for forgetting your roots,” she says, softer than I’d expected. I saunter towards the tree, spit into the cradle and bless it three times with my open palm.

“You know, I never trusted him.” Donna raises her hands and dusts it in the cool air. An owl hoots back. She’s always claimed to have animal conversations even when she’s not intending it.

“It’s okay. We all make the mistake of trusting.”

Crickets blare up the night, suddenly. Donna swings her head towards me. She has that wild, melancholy look again, the same one from when we were kids in her father’s clinic, tearing up prescription papers for fun and future scoldings.

“Look up at the sky, Veera. Why the hell is everything so unproblematic up there?”

I look up. All I see are a few twinkling dots and a crescent moon, its lower tip blurred by grey-white cloud. I’ve never been drawn to big things like skies and metaphysical questions. That’s Donna’s territory. I let her dwell on stuff like that with her fancy KL friends. I don’t know why she’s bringing the sky up now. She knows better. I guess that’s what grief and hatred will do? Who the fuck knows. I’m not a philosopher. 

“Why don’t you look down, Donna? Down to the ground? I heard worms are quite fascinating too.” I almost want to laugh but I remember what we’ve just done and think it’s best not to giggle or evoke mirth at such a time.

She ignores me, though. She pushes her head back, eyes fixed above, and opens her mouth. To catch insects. I’ll never get used to it, no matter how many times she tries to convince me that trapping insects on the tongue is relaxing.  

“What is the limit of the human heart?”

It’s worse than I thought. Tragedy must obviously exaggerate these meditative moods. It’s our first time going this far. Is this the future of our friendship? We should really just stick to regular things like lunches, shopping trips, weekends at the movies. But then again, we’ve never been normal friends.

I bend down, pick up a tiny stone and aim for her back. She doesn’t flinch.

“The limit of the human heart is the fact I’m here even after you did what you did, Donna Gomez.” I throw in her surname to bring her back to our planet. To be honest, I’m trembling. My fingers haven’t stopped twitching since we dug the hole, then my belly started to wobble, and now my feet and calves have joined in. I don’t know how much more I can take, or even why I take it. We’ve been friends, entirely, always, since our mothers put us in a single cradle and taught us how to love each other the way they loved each other. The legacy of friendship had to continue.

It has to.

“Remember, Donna, how we cackled like the crazy women we are when we saw that dumb reel on Tik Tok or Instagram I can’t remember but who cares that’s not the point, but do you remember that reel of the two best friends screaming into loud speakers at each other while they were sitting right next to each other and then saying their friendship was always extra, extra, extra so that’s why they’re not going to be friends forever but friends five-ever?”

The memory is idiotic, perfect for laughing.

Sure enough, Donna starts giggling. “Not five-ever, but it’s 5, as in the numeric and eva as in e-v-a because that’s how dumb the whole thing was but yeah, that was stupid and just what we needed when we were so low after all that ecstasy we took the night before.”

That was also the night Donna met Anwar, I realise, but I don’t exactly want to discuss that dirty little nugget of information. It’ll probably evoke the wrong triggers again.

“Our friendship is 5-eva then,” I try to laugh but it’s surprisingly difficult. I don’t think I like the sound of it the way I liked it the morning after our night of havoc at the club and then jogging along the streets of Langkawi in our mini skirts and tight tops only to meet a cute Malay man on a corner quietly smoking a cigarette. Anwar, the name is Anwar, he said, winking. Gross. I could have told Donna then that the creep was a creep but she wouldn’t have listened. She thought he was an angel, a gift from her atheistic god (“this would be the time to believe is something as silly as a higher power and why not? Sounds like fun.”). She was the one who proposed. She was the one who bought the rings. She was the one who prepared the documents for her conversion into Islam. She was the one who bought him a house. She was the one who dragged me into this mess.

And now this.

The smashed cradle glints in the moonlight. It lies beneath the large dark tree like a predictable omen. They’ll have to bury it too.

“It’s nice you decided to spend some time with the cradle before obliterating it for good. We can’t leave it here, you know.”

“Do you think I’m stupid, Veera? Of course I know we can’t just leave the cradle here. It’s fucking evidence.” She shuts her mouth. Enough insects have possibly entered and rolled around on her tongue. She smiles.

When Donna strangled Anwar’s first wife, I thought I saw that same smile but I said to myself, it’s not possible, no one can smile like that when they’re sucking life out of another person. Or can they?

Anything is possible, Donna likes to say, and she’s probably right.

“I still don’t understand why you had to kill the poor woman—

“She wasn’t poor, Veera. She was standing in the way of my marriage.”

“But why not kill Anwar? He’s the asshole who didn’t tell you he was married.” I truly can’t believe I’m saying what I’m saying but this is what Donna does to me, I guess.

She swings around, violently. “Are you fucking crazy? Why would I want to kill the person I actually want to possess? There’s no logic in that.”

There’s no logic in any of this, I want to say. Stealing Anwar’s baby with his first wife and dumping it outside a church, wrapped in a cloth from the first wife’s house, and then taking the baby’s cradle with them as a kind of token is logical?

“And you think he’s going to be a happy husband now that his first wife has been murdered and his baby is missing? He’s going to be a loving, caring, kind, gentle husband? Is that the logic?” She must hear the disbelief in my tone. Or does she?

“Of course. Anything is possible. I did this for love. Poor Anwar knows nothing about life, about how to take care of a woman. I’m teaching him. And to you, my dear friend, thank you, terima kasih, gracias, sheh-sheh, romba nandri. I couldn’t have done this without you.” She throws her head back and laughs.

I turn to look at the cradle. It looks so sweet and beautiful and displaced on this cool, moonlit night. It doesn’t belong beneath a black tree in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t belong out in the dark. Its place is in a pastel-coloured air-conditioned room of a baby who is now frightened and screaming and traumatised all alone on this terrible night, a night buried in its soul forever, if it survives.

That cradle is the most ridiculous object in the universe.

This friendship is the most ridiculous occurrence in the universe.

I am the most ridiculous human being in the universe.

Donna won’t understand what I’m about to say to her; she won’t understand what I’m about to do; Donna understands nothing of life outside her inventions.

“Good things are supposed to happen inside cradles, Donna,” I say, heading towards the car. Thank the universe I have the key. “Forever is a neat four. Nothing should ever exceed a four. It’s a fucking freak. Our friendship is a freak, isn’t it? I should have known the day you asked me to swallow a live frog. Keep your circus, Donna. It’s exclusively yours.”

I jump into the car, lock it shut, turn the engine on and reverse far away enough from her before rolling down my windscreen. I shout, “If we couldn’t be saved from each other as babies, I goddamn am not going to let another baby die a death it never asked for. For fuck’s sake, Donna, we’re not kids anymore.”

She doesn’t bother to run after the car as I reverse further. It bothers me that I’m reversing slowly enough to give her time to approach. I even stop the car. But Donna isn’t moving. I wait. It’s horrible. Something in me wants her to come back, to hop into the car and do the right thing. I keep waiting. Then I think of the baby outside the church, screaming into the cold night air, a fat frog leaping on its belly, terrorising it further. I want to step on the accelerator but my foot won’t move. Why won’t it move?

I start to weep. I start to sob.

The biggest fucking tragedy of this all is that I’m waiting in the car like a kid, pathetic and innocent, waiting and waiting for my friend to come. I know what I have to do but how do people even begin to do the things they’re supposed to do and drop their nonsense for good?

A frog croaks, loudly, nastily. I don’t even know what it’s an omen for. Maybe the baby is dead, and there’s nothing more that can be done. Something in my stomach relaxes. I’m not supposed to enjoy that thought but I can’t help it. It means I won’t have to move. My foot shivers above the accelerator pedal.

My God, how does anything in the world get done?

How does Donna carry so much bravery in her to swallow human lives whole, and is it bad that my admiration for her is taking on new, disgusting flavours?

I close my eyes and listen to the frog doing its own mad thing. What dignity.

– Shivani Sivagurunathan

Note: This piece was previously published at The Yard: Crime Blog in March of 2025.