The night market at Pratunam never really closed; it just dimmed. At 11:47 p.m. on December 2, 2023, the neon tubes flickered like tired eyelids, and the air smelled of grilled pork, diesel, and the sweet rot of durian left too long in the heat. Lingling Kwong moved through the narrow aisles with the patience of someone who had nowhere urgent to be and everywhere to be.
She wore black from collar to ankle, the uniform of sound engineers who spent their lives in darkened studios: black hoodie, black jeans, black canvas sneakers already gray with Bangkok dust. Only the silver Walkman clipped to her belt broke the monochrome, a 1987 WM-22 she had rebuilt twice, the plastic shell cracked and yellowed like old piano keys.
Lingling never came to markets for clothes or food. She came for dead media. Cassettes, MiniDiscs, reel-to-reel spools someone's uncle had stored in a shoebox since the flood of 2011. Anything that still carried a voice.
Tonight the hunt felt different. Restless. Like the city itself was humming one semitone off.
She almost missed the stall. It was half-hidden behind towers of knock-off Supreme hoodies, a folding table lit by one naked bulb. The vendor was an old man asleep on a plastic stool, mouth open, a cigarette burned down to a finger of ash between his knuckles. On the table: cracked Nokia 3310s, bootleg VCDs of lakorn from the early 2000s, and one small cardboard box labeled in faded marker: 10฿ tapes – weird stuff.
Lingling crouched. The box smelled of incense and mildew. She flicked through the plastic cases with practiced fingers. C-pop she didn't recognize, Thai rock from the '90s, a few blank TDKs with hearts drawn in correction fluid.
Her hand stopped.
One cassette had no cover, only a strip of masking tape across the front. On it, someone had written in purple pen, the ink bleeding slightly:
♡アナタノコエ♡ (Anata no Koe – Your Voice)
Japanese. Cute handwriting. A little heart over the i.
Side A label was blank. Side B had a single tiny sticker: a red lips.
Lingling's pulse did something odd, like a kick drum with the gain turned too high. She didn't know why. She picked it up. The shell was warm, as if it had been sitting in sunlight all day even though the market was covered.
"Ten baht," the old man croaked without opening his eyes.
Lingling slid a purple note across the table. He didn't take it. The cigarette finally fell, scattering ash across the tapes like gray snow.
She left the money anyway.
Back in her Ratchathewi apartment, the city finally quiet enough to hear itself breathe, Lingling locked the door, killed the lights, and sat cross-legged on the floor among towers of vinyl and tangled XLR cables. The only glow came from the orange VU meters of her Tascam mixer.
She clicked the cassette into the Walkman, slipped on her closed-back headphones (Sony MDR-7506, battered but perfect), and pressed PLAY.
Click. Hiss. The gentle rush of blank tape, the sound of 1989 waiting to be born.
Nothing for eight seconds.
Then a soft pop, like someone leaning too close to a microphone.
A girl laughed.
Not polite laughter. The kind that bursts out when you're trying not to but can't stop: bright, breathless, a little wicked.
"P'Ling," the voice said, half-scolding, half-delighted, "you're gonna be late again!"
Lingling's heart forgot its rhythm.
She didn't know any girls who called her P'Ling with that exact rise and fall. She would have remembered. She remembered every voice that had ever said her name.
The laugh came again, closer now, as if the girl had leaned right into the microphone. There was wind, city traffic far away, someone shouting about mango sticky rice. Bangkok sounds, but muffled, like the mic had been hidden in a bag.
Then a whisper, playful: "I'll save you the last mango."
The tape kept spinning, but there was nothing else. Forty-five minutes of Side A: just leader tape flapping.
Lingling rewound, heart thudding too loud in the headphones. She pressed PLAY again.
Same laugh. Same words. Same warmth crawling up her spine.
She flipped the cassette.
Side B.
More hiss. Longer this time. She was about to give up when, at the very end, almost lost under the noise, a different voice, low and sleepy, the kind of voice you use at 2 a.m. when you think no one else is listening:
"Drive safe, little one."
Only four words, but they landed in Lingling's chest like someone had pressed pause on the world.
She yanked the headphones off. The apartment was silent except for the refrigerator hum.
Her phone read 12:03 a.m., December 3.
She exhaled, laughed at herself. Some prank tape, probably. A couple recording flirty messages for each other thirty years ago. Cute. Weird. Whatever.
Lingling brushed her teeth, set the Walkman on the nightstand, and fell asleep to the thought that tomorrow she would find the girl who laughed like summer.
She woke to the alarm she had set for 7:30 a.m. The light through the curtains was the same pale gold. The city sounded exactly the same. Her phone, when she reached for it, read:
Saturday, December 2, 2023 7:30 a.m.
Lingling sat up slowly.
The Walkman was still on the nightstand. The cassette was still inside. The purple 10-baht note was still in her wallet; she checked.
She opened her sound-wave journaling app. The last entry was from yesterday: "Dec 1 – mixed vocals for Faye's new single. Singer kept flirting. Annoying."
No entry for December 2. As if yesterday had been erased.
Lingling dressed in the same black hoodie, same jeans, same sneakers. She told herself it was coincidence. Laundry day tomorrow.
She took the same BTS from Ratchathewi to National Stadium, stood in the same carriage, listened to the same City Pop playlist on shuffle that somehow opened with the same song: "Plastic Love" by Mariya Takeuchi.
At Siam Paragon she bought the same iced Thai tea from the same auntie who called her "dear" in black" every morning.
She walked the skywalk toward the studio.
And then she saw the market.
Pratunam, still open, exactly as it had been twelve hours ago. Same towers of fake Supreme, same sleeping vendor under the naked bulb, same cardboard box.
The cigarette between his fingers was whole again.
Lingling stopped breathing for three full seconds.
She walked to the stall like a woman underwater.
The old man didn't look up. "Ten baht tapes. Weird stuff."
Her hand knew where to go. It slid past the Nokia corpses and C-pop and stopped on the same cassette. Same purple handwriting bleeding at the edges.
♡アナタノコエ♡
She didn't buy it this time. She stood there holding it, feeling the warmth against her palm, and understood with the clarity of a knife in the ribs:
This was not a dream. This was not déjà vu. This was December 2 again, and the tape had rewound the world with it.
Lingling looked up. Across the narrow aisle, under strings of fairy lights, a girl in a sunflower sundress was laughing at something her friend said. The laugh floated over the crowd, bright, breathless, a little wicked.
Lingling's heart stopped a second time.
The girl turned. For one impossible moment their eyes met. The girl tilted her head, puzzled, as if she almost recognized the woman in black staring at her like she'd seen a ghost.
Then the friend tugged her arm and they disappeared into the river of people.
Lingling looked down at the cassette in her shaking hand.
On Side B, almost lost under the hiss, someone had whispered "Drive safe, little one."
And on Side A, someone had promised to save the last mango.
Lingling closed her fist around the plastic shell until it creaked.
"Okay," she said to the night market, to the tape, to whoever was listening on the other side of time. "Let's play."
She pressed the purple note into the old man's sleeping hand, slipped the cassette into her Walkman, put the headphones on, and pressed PLAY one more time.
The girl laughed like summer.
And the city, obediently forgot it had ever been tomorrow.