Echoes of the Hollow Episode 1: The Red Light

In her small but polished apartment tucked inside one of the city’s high-rise towers, Bee adjusted the cuffs of her blazer in front of the mirror. Her hair was still damp—barely towel-dried—and her blouse clung to her skin. The smell of burnt toast lingered; one sad slice, forgotten in the toaster, sagged under a smear of jam. She hadn’t eaten. There was no time. 

Her phone buzzed.

Another day, another deal to defend.

Bee is a corporate lawyer for A Holdings, the real estate empire her father founded and her brother now runs. In a few short years, the company had reshaped skylines and suburbs, uprooting the old and installing the new. Her job wasn’t to build things. Her job was to protect the interests of the firm. 

To ensure that deadlines were met. Contracts sealed. Profit margins untouched. No matter the consequences.

And she was good at it.

The voice on the other end of the call was clipped and urgent. Something had gone wrong with Cypress Hollow, a rural development on the edge of the city’s influence and not far from the village where Bee’s grandparents still lived.

Later, behind the wheel of her compact car, Bee fought her way through weekday gridlock. Fog smeared the windshield despite the wipers, and the roads pulsed with honks and blinking hazard lights. Everywhere, orange barricades marked another stretch of the city being torn up and repaved. Her GPS barked directions over the low hum of a podcast she wasn’t listening to. 

Her mind was already drafting emails, zoning regulations, dispute resolution clauses, environmental waivers.

Then, the red light.

Her car rolled to a stop.

Across the intersection, barely visible through the haze, a young woman argued with a building manager on the steps of a crumbling apartment block. Two children clung to her coat. Black plastic bags lay at their feet, bulging with the weight of their lives. The manager turned away. The woman pleaded. No one helped.

Bee didn’t move. The light stayed red. She gripped the steering wheel.

Wasn’t this the kind of thing her firm solved?

The light turned green. She drove on, passing a billboard that flickered through the fog: a low-slung, vintage-pink coupe with sculpted curves and headlights like winks. She didn’t glance at it, but she knew the tagline by heart.

"Someday..." she told herself. But first, Cypress Hollow.

At the office, she had barely set her bag down when her brother walked into the glass-walled meeting room. 

“We’re delayed on Cypress Hollow,” he said, placing a folder onto the table. “The local team’s stalling. Permits, environmental reviews, the usual drama. I need you to go there and help clean it up.”

Bee nodded. She opened the file. Aerial maps, forested land, red lines slashing through like arteries. She could already hear the paperwork screaming underneath — budgets, deadlines, clauses that erased objections.

She closed the folder.“

Okay,” she said.

As Richard left, her thoughts returned to the red light. To the children. To the fog. To the plastic bags.

The city was cracking under its own weight. If no one else would make space for the people being pushed out, someone had to. And maybe that someone was her. She grabbed her coat, steadied her breath, and stood up straighter.

There was work to do.

ARTIST: SAMANTHA CHEW