There will come a day when the waters will roll over the longkangs, spilling over the banks of Orchard Road, and they will not roll back again. In seven days and seven nights the streets will un-fold into rivers and the canals will un-kink themselves, painstakingly, like a grandfather standing up, and mutter to themselves, Well, that was a good long nap! But there's work to be done. The water rusts the legs of skyscrapers until they are the colour of mangrove roots. It makes caverns out of underpasses and soil out of concrete. It churns sidewalks into mud, burns old roads back into the heart of the land: the mother-roads, the sea-roads, awakening old te-ma-sik, the place encased by sea.

Months pass. Streetlights rediscover their aerial roots. Signboards, forgetting who they are, sprout metallic green blossoms and bloom. Beach Road becomes beach again; swordfish take up residence in the rental flats of Redhill. Further inland, mermaids hatch from the PIE's shifting sands. MacRitchie's macaques shed new names, discover old ones: crab-eater, singer of the nipa palm, diver of the emerald sea. Otters speculate new real estate along old Thomson Road's banks, until cooling measures are enacted by hungry sea eagles. Crocodiles are no longer just an ugly type of shoes.

The sea, patient as always, will take back her names, sungeis and tanjongs and pasirs and all; perhaps only the peaks of bukits will be left unscathed. The merlion will untether itself, and Kusu Island will re-learn how to swim. Eventually even the very ground will unroll itself and the jaws of the longyamen will slam shut for the first and the last time, and the crab-eaters will sing, just as they always have sung, of the wind and the waves and the disappearing sand, before the sea sweeps over them and takes back their names too. Not once in this journey will the names of men be uttered, because the eternal sea has no word for 'centennial'. Only green silence will remain; one day even the wind itself will stop and the ocean will cease to speak its own name.