Mangrove Teeth

24th January 2022, Kota Kinabalu

The violet-blue waves turned silver as they hit the shore. Across Sylvia’s balcony, the salty sea breeze nudged the sliding doors open just enough to make the curtains twitch. Nervous little things. The sky was still dimly lit, thin pink bruises of the dawn peeping through the thick clouds. Then, as if the gods had lit a match and dragged it behind the horizon, the pink bled out, transforming into a sharp, pale gold line.

By 6:00 a.m., the city woke up to its usual symphony; the dry cough of motorcycles, the heavy moans of timber trucks, the distant hum of cars. Overhead, birds cut across the sky in tight formations, heading toward the mangroves and the remaining patches of wild green clinging to the city’s edge.

Sylvia adored this hour. To her, this was the hour of honesty. It wasn’t pretentious; yet.

By noon, the peace would be entirely eviscerated. The metropolis would swarm with linen shirts, leather sandals, and sunburnt shoulders. Tourists chasing likes, filming identical reels and TikToks, stopping locals to demand directions to the newest, noisiest clusters of hipster cafes and souvenir stalls. They flooded the waterfront to photograph the fishermen’s boats as if they were the ones who discovered the sea.

By evening, when the sun dipped, the beach would turn into a crowded amphitheater facing a sky painted in exquisite, almost offensive shades of orange, violet, and pink. Kota Kinabalu was famous for its sunsets; the tourists made sure to consume them without fail.

Sylvia watched the cycle from her nineteenth-floor balcony at the Beach Bay Condominium. They arrived in groups, in suffocatingly close couples, and, more recently, solo. Some looked disheveled under the weight of overpacked backpacks; others looked smug, hungry for the cheap paradise they assumed this island owed them.

She despised them almost immediately.

It wasn’t a matter of prejudice. Sylvia was a journalist; she understood the math. The economy of Sabah depended on tourists the way mangroves feed on brackish water; the state was simply tolerating a tide it couldn’t control. Her repulsion was narrower. Personal.

Her bitterness came from watching them treat her home like a moral vacuum. Because she was trained to notice patterns, she saw everything. She noticed the men who slipped their wedding bands into their pockets the moment they cleared the arrival gate at KKIA, unaware that the faint, pale tan lines on their ring fingers gave them away to anyone who cared to look.

She watched the sad-widower routines played out in hotel lobbies, targeting naive local girls from the lower-income brackets who thought a holiday romance was a ticket out of poverty, only to wake up to an empty bed and a blocked phone number. She’d seen women posing with men who weren’t their husbands, beaming in the reckless, temporary light of a vacation. It was as if loyalty was a liquid asset, left behind at airport security.

At twenty-seven, Sylvia had developed a physical allergy to the illusion of it all. Staying unmarried wasn’t just a lifestyle choice; it was self-defense. She had spent the last three years in comfortable isolation, completely satisfied with the silence of her own apartment.

Every morning, before she stepped into her skin as a reporter, before she became the woman with the harsh opinions, she ran. Ran to clear the static from her head.

Sylvia stared into her mirror with her bare face as she pulled her hair back in a ponytail. She slipped her phone into her shorts pocket and grabbed her car keys. She quickly put on her running shoes, and threw a baggy T-shirt over her sports bra. When she dressed for workouts, she felt herself. Her true self.

The only sounds in the apartment were the soft, electric murmur of the air conditioner and the low, heavy hum of the fridge. Beach Bay Condominium was one of those places slapped together for people desperate to buy a view of the sunset. It was brand-new, all polished tiles and reflective glass; fake elegance at a premium price. Her slice of it sat on the nineteenth floor. Two bedrooms, one bath, a cramped kitchen, and a living area that spilled out onto the balcony through sliding doors. The developer had probably envisioned a young couple clinking wine glasses here. Instead, they got Sylvia. She’d colonized the space with a chaos of books, gym gear, scattered work files, half-spent skincare bottles, and the faint, stale scent of espresso permanently baked into the sofa fabric.

Her bedroom was still trapped in the dawn-shadows. The bed was as always, a disaster zone. Her laptop sat shut on the far side of the mattress, marooned beside a tower of folders. Right next to the bed was her work desk, dominated by a camera tethered to its charger, her Borneo Daily press ID ′Sylvia Turavid Koempping’ and three mugs cradling rings of dried coffee she kept forgetting to wash. In the corner, a small rack of dumbbells stood like miniature sentinels, a resistance band draped over them like a discarded snake.

Then there was the wall.

A massive map of Sabah hung beside her pillows, aggressively defaced with colored markers and jagged handwritten notes in the margins: coastal erosion zones, illegal dumping hotspots, Tuaran mangrove degradation, Inanam workshop pollution. One angry red circle marked a town where a river had choked to black after an “alleged” chemical spill. This was the life she’d carved out for herself: a running tally of disasters, an obsession with forcing the authorities to look at the wreckage they ignored.

Distance made Sylvia look harsh. Up close, the truth was worse: she simply cared too much. She cared about the plastic choking the currents, the coral shattered by reckless tour boats, the garbage shoved into riverbanks, and the logging scars that mutilated lush green slopes into permanent wounds. She ached for the fishermen coming home with empty nets, the kids swimming in toxic runoff, the villagers watching their coastlines shrink into agonizing strips of memory. She cared because she’d seen too much, and her brain didn’t have a delete key.

Her gig at The Borneo Daily (TBD to anyone who lived in the newsroom) kept her moving across Sabah like a stray bullet. One week she was ankle-deep in mud in Sandakan, covering a landfill dispute; the next, she was in Tawau, recording the frantic testimonies of villagers living downstream from a contaminated river. She spent her afternoons sweating under a blistering sun, listening to people who were furious, terrified, exhausted, and invisible.

She loved it. It was the only time she felt useful; giving a vocabulary to the things the world preferred to ignore. People spent their entire lives throwing invisible garbage around and calling it progress. Sylvia just made sure she kept the receipts.

Off the clock, she wasn’t any softer; her intensity just shifted gears. She spent her off-hours in the Beach Bay gym, a room of mirrored walls and a comforting, stale cocktail of rubber mats and heavy disinfectant. She craved the clean, harsh burn of iron. She liked making her muscles protest, liked the quiet satisfaction of forcing her body through its paces. But her absolute holy ritual was the morning run at Likas Beach. Forty-five minutes to an hour, depending entirely on her mood, the weather, and whether her conscience needed clearing or a good punishing.

This morning, the second she stepped into the corridor, the faint, savory scent of a neighbor’s breakfast hit her. Meehoon goreng, definitely. The lift was mercifully empty. Catching her own gaze in the polished steel doors, she used the descent to stretch out her hamstrings.

Down in the parking lot, the air was already thick enough to feel like a warm palm pressed against her skin, carrying the wet, salty tang of the sea and the sharper, green rot of the mangroves up the coast. Slot C-52. She threw herself into the driver’s seat, cranked the engine, and headed toward Likas Beach. One hand on the wheel, the other twitching toward her phone at every red light before she forced herself to drop it. She’d been trying to stop starting her days on Instagram. Attempting and succeeding, however, were two entirely different things.

She pulled up near the jogging trail and killed the engine, taking a beat to let the sunlight hit her. The sea was dead calm. Out on the water, a line of fishermen in small boats were mere black silhouettes against the glare. A few joggers drifted past in absolute silence with headphones glued in, eyes locked forward. Behind them, a couple strolled the sand, posing for selfies. A kid in a neon yellow T-shirt was busy tossing bread crusts at a swirling cloud of seagulls. Then her gaze snagged on a plastic cup abandoned on a bench. Her jaw clenched. She yanked her shoelaces tight, feeling the familiar prickle of irritation heat up her chest. She bolted into a run just to burn it off.

Mornings at Likas were usually delicate. The tide always left intricate lacework in the pale, damp sand, tracked over by the tiny footprints of gulls, crabs, and the rarest blessing of a sea turtle. But then came the artifacts of human apathy. A plastic straw tangled in the sea grass. A crushed bottle drowning in the wet sand. A cigarette butt ground into the pavement.

Sylvia halted, snatching them up with the furious precision of a forensic tech bagging evidence at a homicide scene. By the third piece of litter, her rhythm was shot. She wasn’t the kind of environmentalist who wore the trendy tote bags or posted curated, eco-friendly captions on social media. She was the kind who lost her mind. She felt a deep, burning second-hand embarrassment for the entire human race.

Passing a plastic bottle without picking it up was impossible. If she left it, she’d just picture it drifting out into the current, breaking into toxic micro-shards, and winding up in the gut of some reef fish that didn’t deserve to choke on human trash. She saw the domino effect in everything. A plastic bag snagged on a mangrove branch wasn’t just litter; it was an image, then a statistic, and finally a scathing headline for tomorrow’s paper. The guys at The Borneo Daily always teased her for turning her morning runs into a garbage patrol, joking that she thought she owned the beach. She never laughed. The trash pissed her off because it was a receipt of how people behaved when they thought no one was watching. Or worse; when they simply didn’t give a damn either way.

As a journalist at TBD, she knew exactly how to pry without sounding like an interrogator. She knew how to let a silence stretch until the other person cracked just to fill the quiet. She could spend three hours shooting the breeze with a source and walk away with the crown-jewel scoop without them ever realizing they’d been bled dry.

Despite the grand name, the newsroom itself wasn’t a place of glamour. The Borneo Daily occupied a cramped, narrow floor of an old heritage building right on Gaya Street. The ceiling fans wobbled precariously, fighting a losing battle against the oppressive tropical heat. The coffee machine hacked and coughed far more often than it actually brewed anything. Editors hollered across desks. Phones rang with a frantic, hourly simulated panic. Screens blinked with a non-stop triage of municipal disasters: flash floods, political mudslinging, and the daily circus of public officials denying whatever they’d said the day before. Thankfully, the 2020 lockdowns had broken the leash; management was now perfectly content to let them work from home or on-site. Sylvia loved it either way. The chaos was home.

She craved the sheer discipline of the gig; the grueling necessity of nailing down facts while the rest of the world was happy to just speculate. She chased environmental beats because, to her, the land was like a silent domestic abuse victim, taking blow after blow without a voice to scream. She didn’t just log corporate crimes; she sought out the casualties and cornered the developers.

It wasn’t a grand life, but it felt meaningful. At least, it did until she went home to an empty apartment.

By the time she wrapped up her run, the tourists had fully emerged. Drenched in sweat, her breath dragging in heavy heaves, Sylvia felt that familiar, post-workout lightness. She slowed to a stop near a cluster of coconut trees and surveyed the beach road. A pair of pasty, sunburnt travelers were arguing bitterly with their driver over fare. Two women in matching sun hats giggled over something on a smartphone screen. Then, a guy with a massive DSLR camera; and absolutely zero spatial awareness, stepped backward to frame a shot and slammed right into her.

She hissed a curse under her breath and pivoted back toward her car, thoroughly annoyed.

The city was fully awake now, stripping off its morning peace. Food stalls rolled up their shutters. Delivery riders darted through early traffic. Busloads of school children spilled out onto the pavement for a morning school excursion. Somewhere in the distance, construction machinery began its rhythmic thudding. The world was reassembling itself into its grand daytime illusion, pretending everything was perfectly normal.

Sylvia got back to Beach Bay with a soaked shirt and thighs that throbbed with a satisfying, breakfast-earning ache. She crossed the lobby, trading a silent nod of recognition with the security guard, Ebner. The air down here smelled clean, polished marble laced with the salt breeze sucked in by the revolving doors.

Up on the nineteenth floor, she kicked off her runners and stood in the quiet of her apartment, hands on her hips, her chest rising and falling. Sunlight poured through the living room now, cutting across the pale floor tiles and flashing off the glass coffee table. Out there, the ocean had brightened to a blinding glare. Clouds drifted overhead like slow, fat snails. Across the water, the islands looked like dark green blobs adrift in the blue. The view was so sickeningly beautiful it actually made her angry. It felt like the city was putting on makeup just to hide its scars.

She hit the shower immediately, turning the bathroom into a wall of steam. She scrubbed the brine from her skin, shampooed the sweat out of her hair, and leaned one palm against the tile, letting the hot water work the stiffness out of her calves.

When she finally emerged wrapped in a towel, the light in the apartment had shifted again. Her work bag sat slumped on a dining chair. Her phone lay right where she’d dumped it on the table, marooned next to her notebooks and a warm, half-empty bottle of 100 Plus.

She pulled on some loose loungewear, blow-dried her hair before twisting it up, and padded toward the kitchen for caffeine; dragging along the small army of dried-up coffee mugs she’d finally salvaged from her bedroom.

The kitchen was narrow, a functional slot of white cabinets, stainless steel, and a small window over the sink looking straight into the opposite tower. A clutter of magnets from her travels across Sabah covered the fridge, anchoring a few old receipts and a faded photo of her late mother; who lived out in Penampang. Sylvia reached into the cupboard and bypassed the clean sets, pulling out a chipped mug with a blue rim and the Sepilok Sun Bear and Orangutan Sanctuary logo. It had been her favorite since she was seven years old.

While the kettle climbed to a boil, she stepped onto the balcony and looked down at the coast road. It was only 8:55 a.m., but the tourists had already outnumbered the locals around the street stalls. A family crowded a tricycle vendor hawking local snacks. Nearby, a couple leaned against the railing, giggling at something trapped on their camera screen. Sylvia took it all in with that familiar, heavy fatigue.

They all looked so temporary. Like they’d moved into the city to borrow it for a weekend, with absolutely no intention of taking care of it. They’d snap their photos, gorge on cheap seafood, and post the sunsets, all while dropping greasy wrappers, cigarette butts, and plastic bottles in their wake. There was an unspoken smugness to them. They looked like people who truly believed the entire world was nothing more than a backdrop for their lives.

She walked back inside and sat at the dining table with her phone, fully intending to check the weather, the local headlines, and maybe whatever fire her editor had emailed her about. Instead, Instagram bloomed across her screen as if by muscle memory. For a second, her thumb hovered over the glass. She knew better. She knew damn well that a scroll would only sour her mood further. She knew it, but every single morning, the same impulse clawed at her like a thirst.

She tapped search and typed the handle from memory: @DominicVillanuevasNest_KB.

The account loaded, revealing the familiar profile picture and an almost offensively perfect grid. A smiling family. The husband had a cheeky, crooked grin and the build of a man who worked outdoors and actually liked being alive in his own skin. The wife had a gentle face, graceful hands, and the kind of effortless beauty that made even an ordinary coffee mug next to her look curated. Then there was their little daughter, all bright eyes and round, pinchable cheeks, usually positioned right in the center of some domestic tableau that felt simultaneously intimate and cinematic. Their reels weren’t glossy in the fake, influencer sense. They were better than that. They were simple. Authentic. Totally convincing. The sort of content that made a stranger feel like they’d been invited into a life that was real in all the ways that actually mattered.

Sylvia had stumbled across them months ago, and she hadn’t completely recovered since.

There was one particular reel she replayed constantly; a ridiculous, mundane little clip that had no business living rent-free in her head. The husband was hanging laundry in a sunny yard, his shirt sleeves rolled up, moving with an easy, almost theatrical patience while singing to his wife off-camera. He didn’t have a polished singer’s voice; it was a slightly off-key, warm baritone that made the whole scene feel private and entirely accidental. He was belt-whispering “You’re Beautiful” by Jesse McCartney, and the wife, holding the phone, was laughing that helpless, breathy way people laugh when they are loved well enough to be teased.

Sylvia had watched it easily twenty times.

Then there was the other one. The one that left a strange, hollow ache in her chest. The husband was standing in the kitchen, their 18 month old daughter balanced on his hip, while he stirred a pot on the stove with his free hand. The wife asked him a question from off-screen, and he answered without missing a beat, while the little girl buried her face in his shoulder. The pot bubbled. Sunlight cut through the window behind them. It was such a minuscule moment, yet the gravity of the tenderness in it was massive. Sylvia remembered thinking, the very first time she saw it, that this was what love looked like when it survived long enough to become ordinary.

She had zero use for romance in her own life. She was too busy, too cynical, and far too irritated by the staged performances of affection people put on for the public. She was single, and she was fine with it. Mostly. She’d dated, of course. A few times. Just enough to learn that a spark could easily be mistaken for character, and that loneliness was often misread as destiny. But nothing had ever stuck. Not in the city, not in the orbit of the newsroom, and certainly not in the background noise of her own restless mind. At twenty-seven, she’d built a fortress out of deadlines, protein shakes, long runs, and other people’s environmental disasters. Most nights she came home to an empty kitchen, made dinner for one, and scrolled until her eyes burned dry. The apartment was too beautiful to feel lived-in. Too open. Too quiet. Out beyond the glass, the sea looked like a promise on the good days, and a warning on the rest.

Dominic’s account didn’t feel like a performance. It felt warm. The rooms looked lived-in, and the captions were always light, effortless, and deeply affectionate. He’d originally come to Sabah from the Philippines as a tourist years ago, only to fall head over heels for a local girl working the front desk at his resort. That love story was what had truly snagged Sylvia’s attention. Unlike the hollow, transactional flings rotting the rest of the city, Dominic was different. You could see the adoration for his wife and daughter burning in his eyes. It felt like a fairy tale. Or maybe the receptionist had just struck gold.

He’d arrived in March 2020 for a quick vacation, only to find himself marooned when the pandemic locked the world down. With the hotel bleeding money, management gutted the staff to minimize infection risks. People quit; contracts were terminated. Yet his future wife, Atilia Lungsan, kept showing up diligently every single day because she had bills to pay. Specifically, her father’s cancer treatments. She’d been terrified that a COVID infection would kill the old man long before the tumors did. One quiet afternoon at the desk, she’d broken down and confided in Dominic. That shared vulnerability pulled them closer, day by agonizing day, until he decided he was never going back. The rest was history.

Their daughter, Elvia, laughed with a pure, ringing sound that made Sylvia believe in joy for a fleeting second, right before she reminded herself how fragile joy actually was. The husband always seemed entirely present. The wife always looked thoroughly adored. Their grid was an endless stream of birthdays, home-cooked meals, random roadside stops, beach trips, and clumsy kitchen dances. Little clips of the kid napping on the sofa, or the husband hauling groceries while Atilia playfully chided him off-camera for buying too much. It was all so cleanly, beautifully ordinary that Sylvia had started checking their page the way normal people checked the morning weather.

Surviving in a city choked with people pretending to be temporary versions of themselves had turned her strangely devoted to this one digital family. On screen, they were the exact antithesis of the tourist circus. Grounded. Honest. Sweet. Real. Or, if it wasn’t entirely real, it was at least a dreamscape Sylvia desperately wanted to trust.

Granted, she knew enough about social media to understand how easily it lied. She worked in news, for God’s sake. She knew exactly how footage could be cropped, how captions could soften jagged edges, and how an entire life could be edited into a sterile version meant to make strangers feel safe. But she also knew what isolation did to a person’s perception. Sometimes you see precisely what you need to see because you are starving for a shape to hold onto. Sylvia suspected that pathetic weakness in herself and despised it. Yet every time she watched them, her cynicism faltered. They were so lovely it was almost offensive.

Almost.

She scrolled to their latest post; a snapshot of the three of them at a roadside stall somewhere out in Kota Belud, a late-afternoon sky bleeding a deep blue behind them. The kid had ice cream smeared across her cheek. Atilia was laughing directly into the lens. Dominic had one heavy arm thrown around both of them, looking like a man caught in the absolute act of being content.

The caption was simple. Something generic about family time, a note of gratitude, and a quick joke about the toddler eating more dessert than her parents. The comment section below was a warm bath of hearts, blessings, and local affection. Sylvia stared at the photo until the pixels blurred into the white glare of her screen.

Then, her eyes drifted to the timestamp.

2 days ago.

She frowned.

It wasn’t cause for alarm yet, but it was unusual. They posted almost daily, often stacking multiple stories in a single afternoon. A reel in the morning, a quick update from the market, a video of dinner or bathtime, or a clip of Dominic doing something mildly embarrassing to make his wife chuckle. A forty-eight-hour radio silence was enough to leave a small, hollow dent in the rhythm of her morning routine.

Sylvia dragged her thumb down, refreshing the feed.

Nothing.

She did it again.

Still nothing.

A tiny knot of unease tightened in her stomach. It was irrational and sudden, the raw physical reaction of a brain expecting a familiar digital ping and receiving only a blank wall instead. Standing there with her coffee, the chipped Sepilok mug warm against her palms, she stared at the screen.

She tapped their stories icon. Empty. The colorful ring was gone. She scrolled down to the comments section of their last post. The tone had shifted; the usual hearts and blessings were being crowded out by questions. No updates? Are you guys okay? Hope all is well, fam. Miss your posts.

Within seconds, she was jumping between accounts. The husband’s profile. The wife’s. Even the daughter’s tiny, fan-made hashtag page she’d unearthed weeks ago out of sheer, late-night curiosity. Nothing. Flatline silence across the board.

Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself.

People went off the grid. Phones fell into toilets. Families got busy. Real life existed outside the digital frame, and not every blip in production required a dramatic conspiracy theory. Yet the wrongness stuck. It nagged at the base of her skull like a persistent fly she couldn’t swat away.

Sylvia set her mug down with a hard clink and stood up. The morning light had fully invaded the apartment now, exposing every surface with a blinding, clinical clarity. The sofa with its crumpled navy throw. The open bookshelf loaded with dense texts on climate change, Sabah’s vanishing wildlife, and the embarrassingly battered romance paperback she’d never admit to owning. A pair of crusty gym gloves left on the hallway bench. Her running watch blinking as it charged on the sideboard. The television screen, dark and staring. Outside, the city was already shimmering, heat building rapidly over the flat water.

She retreated to her bedroom, pulling on her work uniform without really registering the choices. Cotton blouse, dark tailored trousers, sensible flats. Then she sat on the edge of the unmade mattress, phone still glued to her palm, and pulled up the profile yet again. Her thumb was moving faster now, tapping with an anxious, aggressive rhythm. Still no new posts. No stories. No impromptu lives. No ‘hey guys, we’re taking a break’ note.

Forty-eight hours.

Switching to her browser, she typed their names into the search bar. Search results cascaded down. Photographs, a few local shares, and an old feature article on the husband’s homemade cooking videos. Despite her mood, a ghost of a smile touched her lips. The writer had dubbed them “Kota Belud’s beloved online couple.” At the time, she’d thought the phrase was sickeningly accurate.

Now, it just felt ominous.

Tapping back to Instagram, she stared at Dominic’s face in his profile picture. That easy, crooked smile she’d absorbed almost unconsciously over the last few months. It was terrifying how a total stranger could become a fixture in your mind without you ever breathing the same air. Strange, and more than a little pathetic. She knew she didn’t know them. She knew the intimacy was a one-way street running straight into a screen. And yet, she felt a sudden, fierce pulse of protectiveness toward that little household. Toward the kid with the sticky ice-cream face and the wife with the quiet laugh. Toward the fragile idea that somewhere in Sabah, there was one damn family untouched by the rot she documented every single day.

Out in the corridor, a heavy door groaned open. A kid cried out briefly, then went quiet. Far below on the street, a delivery truck began its loud, rhythmic backing-up beep. The AC hummed its steady drone. The city breathed its heavy, humid breath.

Sylvia stayed frozen in the center of her bedroom, phone in one hand, the other pressed hard against her hip. A cold thread of suspicion slid through her, thin and sharp as a nylon fishing line.

Two days without an update was a vacation. But sudden, total silence in a world built entirely on the currency of constant performance? That was a scream.

She opened the profile one last time, staring at the roadside stall snapshot until the saturation seemed to burn her eyes. The husband. The wife. The daughter.

A perfect little family. Or a perfect little lie.

Her jaw clenched.

Outside the window, a lone gull shrieked over the water, a sharp, piercing sound that cut cleanly through the morning. It was enough to make her glance toward the glass, seeing her own faint, tense reflection superimposed over the glare of the sea. When she looked back down at the screen, she felt herself slip across an invisible line. The boundary between mild irritation and absolute necessity.

She didn’t know yet that she was about to cross into an obsession. She only knew that the quiet had started to feel hostile.

And if there was one thing about Sylvia, it was that once she caught the scent of something wrong, she never, ever let it go.