It has been six months since my epiphany.

On the morning of my conversion, I was staring at the sterile white linoleum that lines the floor of the underground lab where I spend my days, indolent in artificial light.

Mary, the peroxide-blonde office slut had ensnared me in a tiresome flirtation. She slid up to me that morning wearing too much lipstick and much more eye-shadow. She purred a greeting, and brushed her arm casually against mine. The smell of her overwhelmed me, it was rosy and rotten. Her scent distracted me from my work with its fetid desperation. I stared at her through my glasses; making sure the glare obscured my disgust, and forced a smirk that I knew would make her thighs twitch. Mary was puppyish in her devotion to me, convinced I was a genius, that my aloof exterior was a shell for a lonely, suffering soul. This was partly due to a bored manipulation on my part, I’d casually left some scribbled lines of maniac poetry on my desk for her to see, and she’d eaten it up. The rest of her delusion stemmed from a deep, almost dogmatic faith in clichés. Her cubicle was covered with inspirational quotes, some of which she had written out in painstakingly cramped calligraphy — because a personal touch is never too much!

I had been languishing in ennui for weeks, and was growing tired of my own company; so when she bounced up to me and started poking around my workspace, I asked her to dinner. It was for amusement, much like the way one goes to watch a bad movie to scoff and feel superior. I regretted it even before she squealed like a delighted sow. I nearly cancelled our assignation, but the thought of another monotonous night blurred into oblivion with a bottle of bourbon depressed me.

That evening, Mary opened the door wearing a simulacrum of the white dress from Monroe’s Seven Year Itch, and stiletto heels. Before her straining white breasts, she carried a screen-printed tote daintily, with the eponymous starlet trapped, startled, on the sides.

“You’re a vision.” Of the most infernal sort — I almost added.

She gasped a thank you, and shivered with joy, “I made it myself!”

I can see that, you heinous bitch, I nearly spat. Instead I kissed her baby powdered fingers and whispered, “Norma Jean herself would be envious.”

She stared at me blankly for a moment, and then smiled knowingly, “Is that the name of that well-dressed receptionist in the lobby? She’s a cute, young thing, but you know what they say about the beauty of youth.”

I feigned amusement, “And what’s that?”

“It’s fleeting! Now a Beauty like me or Marilyn….”

I resisted the urge to shove a fist down her gullet, and chuckled appreciatively instead. The rest of the evening unfurled in a way that tested the limits of my skills in deception and flattery. Mary switched between vamp and coquette through dinner and opera, by midnight I had downed my fifth bourbon and my thin veneer of respect was cracking. As we stood on the curb outside of the opera house, Mary clung to my side like a simpering tumor while I frantically waved down a cab. When a taxi finally screeched up to the curb, Mary shouted, “Adieu my amore!” and swooned melodramatically toward my arm just as I moved forward to open the door. She slipped and landed neatly in a puddle of filth, destroying her unfortunate gown.

“I think it’s broken,” she muttered, brokenly, of her ankle. I glared down at her, only to find her transformed, the agony in her limb was displayed on her face. Suddenly, she was my Madonna, my blood red bloom in a field of snow. My epiphany.

She was staring at me through layers of make-up; her knitted brows were ravens in flight, her twisted lips a heartrending wound, her glazed eyes were diamonds of pure anguish. As her breath came in gasps, and the shadows passed over her face like storm clouds over the plains, I felt my trousers getting tight, tight, tighter.
She was the kinesis to my inertia. The energy I needed to cast off the reptilian slumber of my existence lay tumultuous on her face, vigorous in her contorting body. When twisted in pain, this wretched cliché of a woman had the radiant face of Christ enraptured. I picked her up, my prize, my light, and thrust her into the taxi. I barely suppressed an ecstatic groan when I saw the expression on her face at the jolt of the seat. My eyes were fixed on her through the entire ride; I didn’t want to miss an instant of her expression. She interpreted my rapt attention as concern, and a puppyish smile began to flit across her features. I quickly covered her leg with my coat, grabbed her broken ankle, and squeezed. I shushed and comforted over her incoherent screams so the cabby wouldn’t suspect. The look of horror on her face added another dimension to her features that was not so much rapturous as erotic. At my residence, I carried her, struggling and whimpering to my fifth floor flat with the energy of one who is reborn and filled with purpose. I injected her with a sedative stolen from work, and began to prepare.

After handcuffing her to the bed, I ran down to the store and began collecting my supplies. I bought the various necessities, and hurried back to my femme fatale.

The wild-eyed darling was just waking when I re-entered my bedroom. She remembered the pain in her ankle and the cruel treatment in the cab. She began struggling, as the sedative wore off completely, and let out a string of unbecoming curses. The obscenities were distracting; like sitting next to a vagrant when one is dining on a fine meal. It had to be remedied. I gave her a dose of a formula of my own concoction to keep her long body languid, while inversely sharpening her sensations. Tenderly, I wiped away the dribble and bile at her lips and pried her jaw open with a gauze-covered forefinger and thumb. Whispering and crooning all the while I found the slippery organ and removed her ability to form words with a few quick incisions from my scalpel and a skillful cauterization. Her hackneyed curses could no longer interrupt our tryst. Only luscious whimpers and gurgles remained.

I remember those first days of our romance with nostalgia. That first week was like a honeymoon for her and me. I had only to twist her ankle gently, or burn her very slightly with my cigarettes to see her contorting with dazzling pain. My dear little doe was delicate in the precious beginning, she would lose consciousness within the first ten flails of my cat-o-nine tails, studded with nails. She would wake as I sutured her wounds tenderly, playfully scratching at cuts and peeling at newly healed scabs. I would salt the incisions I made on her heaving belly with the utmost care, my eyes fixed unblinkingly at the radiance of her twisted, begging face. Her pain was my bliss, her terror my aphrodisiac. The more I took from her, the more she became mine. I absorbed her pain and mutilation and was constantly on the brink of ejaculation in those first blessed days.

The nectar flowed too freely in the beginning, and within a month Mary had run out of grace. It was my blunder; I should have kept her too delirious to realize the purpose of her torturous captivity, but a man has to rest, especially a man in the constant throes of elation. I’d burned through all my liquid concentrate lye, snapped and reattached every delicate tendon in her nubile body. My laundry room was a mass of bloodied, yellowed sheets, and Mary’s pained face was growing more stoic by the day. I wracked my brain for new ways to find my love, and was rewarded by fleeting glimpses at my agonized goddess. But to no avail, as the weeks slipped by, she retreated farther and farther from me.

Now, the honeymoon is over. These days, Mary is cold and leathery. The torturous weeks have aged her; her movements, once so annoyingly bouncy, are pained to the point of brittleness. My monstrous adulation has sapped her of all her vitality and what is left are winces that leave me disappointed. Instead of moaning or contorting when I light a match near her breast, she gazes at me with dull eyes that fade deeper into their hollows every day. Sometimes, when I do something particularly ghastly to her, I see a familiar spark in the deep down depths of her eyes and something else unnamable. Hatred? No. Perhaps she is grateful to me for unmaking her, for reducing her to her purest form. But the subsequent glaze smoothes away all signs of life. She is not doing this to spite me, it is my own fault, I loved her too passionately, I scooped out the insides of her soul and made her mine, and now she is but a shell. These days, I torture her more for the comforting routine of it than the thrill.

It’s halfhearted; truly I never wanted to hurt her. I don’t feel the old loathing for her personality; her trials have absolved her of that. I even feel a certain affection for this third incarnation of Mary, not unlike the way a person would feel towards a recliner, or a well-worn pair of shoes. I’m not angry at her for deadening her senses; I know she’s given me everything. But it’s lonely, terribly lonely without her.

Mary and I have settled into a weekend pattern, like all lovers tend to do. I spend all my golden Sundays swimming in her broken body, scratching and clawing and nibbling at a tibia a fibula an — I’ll let you go soon, be hopeful, be sensitive, little bird… I am sweet, so saccharine to her, my charred and tough-skinned playmate.

Today, I am rewarded for my kindness when I present to her a faded photograph of her mother that I procured from her old white-fenced residence in Technicolor suburbia. I hold the photo up for her to see, as her hands are chained and, besides, many of her fingers are too nail-less to grasp. My heart thumps as I watch her eyes pool with tears and hear her breath begin to come in gasps.

“Yes, darling. You miss your mummy, don’t you? You know, you looked like her, before I found you. And what would she say if she saw you now? Would she recognize her sweet little lamb?”

A wordless scream issues from her throat as Mary thrashes on our sticky sheets in pain, and I feel the echoing ache in my chest, and more sweetly aching, expanding, deeper down in my bowels. It has been too long since I’ve seen her, a week, almost. And seeing her, the excitement is overwhelming, dark and huge, it swallows me and I am empty.

Overly exerted, I drowse, her head pillowed on my soft and slightly moist belly. I fall, blood-scent and lust-spent into dark, lush dreams. In the dream, I’m peeling her scarred skin away, parting muscles, sucking on a succulent tidbit here, and there. I’m stroking her liver, kneading her womb, watching her face as I find the curled up creature, the little reptilian girl, born of her mother’s agony. Excitement surges when I see the horror in Mary’s unblinking eyes. I’ve discovered her secret! My daughter, an incestuous start of an incestuous line. My little darling will be beautiful, I can tell; her face most expressive, her neurons snappy. Her papa will dote on her with pins and pliers, hard metal used with tenderest care. While mama looks on with pride and recognition, she will finally understand what papa was mesmerized by in those first months. I twist and rend them both in impossible ways, all the while, their faces; their perfect faces stare at me in rapture. Even as I dream I am aware of the impossibility of it. I am dry and impotent as a corpse. I want to stay in the blood-red chamber of Mary’s womb and dream of our family forever. But a sharp stabbing pain in my thigh wakes me and when I open my eyes, Mary is grasping at my legs with her slick, red fingers. A hypodermic needle is jammed in my femoral artery. The apparatus waggles comically like the windblown stem of a sterile flower. The plunger has been pressed.

Immediately, I begin to fade in coordination and grow in awareness. A detached part of me marvels at the efficacy of my formula while the rest of me shakes and rattles. My eyes spin round and round, left to right, madly staring, glaring. This must be fear, creeping up my esophagus as acid and bile. I want to vomit, my mouth tastes like blood. I must get a grip on myself, for Mary’s sake. How could I forget to bind her? What will she do if she loses me? Who will she have if I am not here to love and pluck her?

I watch as she climbs me clawingly. Her mouth is wide open, she’s slack-jawed with love. I observe the ascent of her yawning maw. Purplish veins and a glossy stump are reminders of the squirmy little organ I so scientifically excised. I count the bottom teeth, observe how her pinkish gums seem to cling to the ivory that pierces them mercilessly. I have time to be mesmerized by the eerily beautiful inside of Mary’s ruined mouth, but no time to react to the incisors and bicuspids sinking into my neck. With the absence of the tongue, the entire cavern of Mary’s mouth seems to be taking me in, chomping, chomping my flesh. I try to push her away. Her eyes are a wild and stormy gray. Some madness, unearthed by my longing, has been freed in her. Limply, I try to subdue her, but her fury stops me. Her beauty has somehow been magnified in her rage. I am powerless against it.

She is my vengeful goddess, and I, her odalisque. Mary, my only love, stabs me with the same knife I have stroked over her body so many times. I moan, ecstatic, as she wounds me more deeply than I ever have, her hands in my guts, squeezing and playing with me in ways that I never dared with her. The world turns a florid, rotten red. Joyous, the last thing I see is her face. Twisted in pain.

By David Foote

I am…that is, I was, a broker with Dalian Futures in Shanghai. I had a gorgeous 3 bedroom apartment in Century Park with wood floors through-out, views of the river and a hot tub in the ensuite bathroom. Bay windows like you wouldn’t believe and a pretty but boring, blue eyed bitch of a girlfriend. She wrote “Celebrity Image Consultant” under profession on her visa forms, and didn’t give a tupenny fuck how many kids in Guangzhou she’d sent blind hand-stitching her new gucci pumps. The jungle is no place for bleeding hearts after all.

If that all sounds like some gutless middle manager’s twisted wank fantasy… if indeed you should experience jealousy, do not panic. That is the reaction my lifestyle was intended to provoke. Every empire has it’s Nero after all. In the sage words of Axyl Rose, “nothing lasts forever not even cold November rain”.
I guess we all have our own ideas about how all this started. In my case though, it started with a dream.

I was stuck in a broken turnstile, unable to move forwards or backwards. I thought…no…knew, I was in the Philippines… maybe in Manilla… and for some reason it was very important I catch the next train. There were long cues at all the turnstiles, although the other lines were moving well, and I remember some Filipino behind me getting frustrated, shouting at me and pushing. The public address system seemed to be malfunctioning as well, and kept cutting in and out, “will be” …[pop]… “-eparting from plaform” …[bzzzt]… “five minutes. Babae at Lalaki, ang” …[clickx2]… “sa Quezon Avenue, Kamuning, Araneta” …[hideous feedback]… “paalis mula sa platform ng isa sa limang minuto.”

Some of the station security noticed what was going on in the line behind me and so began to move in my direction, pushing through the crowd heading onto platform one. I checked my watch. It’s a Rolex Submariner. The 2010 model with the enamelled green face. It’s got that sweep they say you should look for when you’re buying one, so you know your not getting a fake. Instead of ticking from one moment to the next, the second hand sweeps around the dial.

6.30am, Wednesday, June 18.

That sticks in my head, because its at that point that I start to think I might be dreaming. A small, but insistent part of my sub-conscious knows it was Monday when I went to sleep. Suddenly there is a pop and a flash of light, and when I look up I see the crowd surging back towards me and away from platform one. I see a man stop running and brace himself against the crowd. It looks for a second as if he is praying and then he explodes.

Time stops.

Security are caught in the act of drawing their pistols, too slowly. I see individual screws and iron bolts from the bomb scything out through the crowd. The bomber stands transfixed and bloated, his body now more air and flame than skin or muscle. A girl, probably no older than 11, is frozen in an attitude of fear and pain as a piece of PVC pipe from the bomb casement slices off her leg.

And after that I woke. It was all very vivid. I may have been crying I don’t remember. I checked my watch. It must have been, I don’t know, three or four in the morning. I don’t remember off hand. It took me a while to get back to sleep, I know that. Elaine slept through the whole thing of course, which isn’t saying a lot. After two Zimovanes Elaine could sleep through an actual bomb going off.

The next day at work I felt like a sack of stones and rags, all leaden and spongy. For anyone who is unclear on what I do, or did, my job was to take other peoples money and use it to bet on the future performance of different markets. A futures contract is an undertaking to buy a specified amount of something, say apples, at a specified point in the future for a specified price. If the value of apples were to rise above the agreed price and the contract had matured then that meant a profit for my client. On the other hand, if the price of apples looked like it was going to tank, it was my job to sell the contract on before it started to cost the investor money.

“Imagine your futures portfolio is an aeroplane,” I used to tell my clients, “and the individuals futures are its passengers. With the autopilot on, that plane can fly itself from London to Los Angeles just as well as a human could under normal circumstances. Mind you, when your cruising at 20,000 feet and one of the engines catches fire, who’d you rather was at the controls? Dan Dare or Robbie the futures trading robot?”

In case you were wondering, I’m Dan Dare in that analogy. That morning I was Dan Dare on two long blacks, a couple of neurofen and three hours sleep but I was Dan Dare none-the-less. I kept falling into a waking dream where limbs and severed heads would gently arc across my periphery. Wasn’t going to stop me doing my job now, though was it? Your damn right it wasn’t. All in a days work for the Pilot of the Future let me tell you.

Our firm was the only one on this side of the Huang pu with real coffee. Mr. Liu, the Executive VP was a sucker for it. Obsessed as only the born again can be and too anal to order it in from the starbucks down the street. Instead he sent his PA, a gorgeous little Hunanese skirt called Judy, who had an MBA from LSE, eyes that said “come kiss me” and a mouth which said “I bite”, on a Barrista course. He also had the board put a espresso machine next to his office. Officially it was all about creating a “culture of excellence” or some shit, but the upshot was that, between his love of coffee and his superb taste in totty, there were nearly always more IT guys hanging out by the coffee machine, chatting to his secretary, than there were actually manning the help desk.

But Judy must have been on a break or something. The corridor was unusually quiet. Our technical services manager was still hanging around like a bad smell though, fiddling with the knobs on the coffee machine and staring wistfully at Judy’s desk. “Morning Finn,” he said which is my name.

“Dave,” I replied, which was his.

“You look like shit man. You coming down with something.” Dave never really got the hang of tact. He’s Afrikaans, though. They come out of the womb like that apparently.

“I don’t think so mate. Not unless you can get PTSD from dreams.”

“STDs? Shit… what kind of fokked up dream sex you been having my friend? Am I in these gay STD dreams or something? Is that it? Cause you know man, I’m happily married.”

“PTSD, you muppet, post-traumatic stress disorder. I had this dream where I was in the Philippines okay… and a bomb went off and now I think I’m having flashbacks. Christ… I can’t believe I just told you that.”

“Wow, thats some heavy, heavy shit man. Heavy shit. You want milk in your coffee or not?”

I said no, and drank deep. “Milk is for the meek and well rested,” I told him. So much for that theory. A humming bird drowning in treacle, that’s what it feels like… overstimulation, I mean. Very difficult to focus.

I think it was Clauswitz who said, “he who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious” and I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood to fight. Around three/three thirty I decided to call my clerk and see if he could come in early. By four thirty I was at home trying to relax, with a half bottle of Glenfiddich, a couple of Elaine’s sleeping pills and Muse on the stereo. Elaine was going on and on about some Fashion thing she wanted us to go to. I gave her the phone and told her to call someone who was into that shit. She stormed out yelling about how we never do anything as a couple, or something. The last thing I remember was the whine of the waste disposal chewing through something hefty, and then I passed out.

*****

“It’s time that the fat cats had a heart attack,
You know that their time’s coming to an end.”

My phone woke me. I couldn’t immediately figure out where I was. I crawled off the couch and fumbled for my jacket in the dark. Muse was still stuck on repeat in the background. “Hello?” I croaked, my eyes squinting against the glare from my phone and my mouth all creaky with half remembered dreams.

“Hi, Finn, it’s Mike.”

“Mike?”

“Mike. Your clerk Mike Zhou… from work. So sorry to call you Bro… so early right? Something pretty big has happened though. Xinhua is reporting terrorists have just made some big attack in the Philippines. Two train stations in Manilla were bombed, and the Baguio City Economic Zone and the… ahhh… the Intel plant in Cavite have also been attacked.”

“Sorry mate… I’ve got a head on me like a kicked about water melon. Did you just say a train station was bombed?”
“In the Philippines, yes.”

“Bullshit. Did Dave put you up to this?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Look… y’know… if this is a joke Mike I’m not laughing”

“It’s not a joke.”

“It’s… shit… it’s 6.30 isn’t in Mike?”

“No… I mean yes…. It’s 6.45.”

“Fuck” I was stunned.

“I’m sorry I don’t know what I’m doing. Intel has taken a dive on the ASX and on the NYSE, and the PSEi is due to open in three hours… and who knows what thats going to do. Turn on the News if you don’t believe me.” Silence reigned. Just line noise and Mike’s fear sweat on the other end of the phone. “Finn… Mr. Coen…you still there?” he asked.

“Yeah… yeah I am… Sorry. Look… I’m on my way alright? Watch our margins but don’t do anything else till I get there,” I told him, turning on the kitchen light and filling up the kettle, “just hang in there and call me if anything else changes.”

I hung up the phone, and went back to the sink to turn the water off. It was pooling around something lodged in the disposal. A shoe. My shoe. One of a pair of £500 calf-skin Salvatore Ferragamo’s to be specific.
Crazy bitch. She’s like a two year old on blue smarties some days, I swear to god. I made myself a green ginger tea then popped a couple of Neurofen, to get rid of the whisky and zimmies hangover I had brewing. Sod it, I thought, and got out my phone again,

after which it was back to being her problem.

The whole way to work I was trying to talk my way out of this new mentalism. Like say Mike had been wrong, or maybe I misheard him, and it wasn’t the Philippines at all. Or it wasn’t a train station. As soon as I walked through the doors though I realised self-deception was going to be a hard ask.

There were about 15 brokers standing around the big flat-screen plasma we had up in the lobby. They were watching a grainy video the BBC had pulled off of some Islamist website. A rice-eater, wearing a dishtowel over his face and standing in-front of a flag with a knife on it was jabbering at the camera.

“This day is the dawn of a new day in the Philippines,“ he said. “We no longer intend to limit ourselves to punishing the servants, while their western masters are allowed to remain safe in fortresses of materialism and corporate avarice. This attack was a reminder to the kafir imperialists that they are not welcome in the Philippines, that they are not safe here and that their pornography and their idolatry will soon be wiped from our villages and from our cities for good. There will be more attacks like this one in the coming weeks, inshalla. We are not your slaves.”
After that there was a shot of just the flag, and then they cut back to the news anchor, a pretty young Indian bird clearly trying very hard not to look like a cat caught with a sparrow in its gob,

“Right well… a statement there from the leadership of the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf, who seem now to be claiming responsibility for these attacks. I am joined now in the studio by Michael Phelps, a Senior Consulting Fellow with the International Institute of Strategic Studies here in London. Michael, at least three other groups are also claiming responsibility for this. Does this mean that by making this statement Abu Sayyaf may just be jumping on the band-wagon?”

“Not at all Manisha. The reality is that Abu Sayyaf is the only group in the…ahh…region to have the organisational ability to pull off co-ordinated attacks of this…well, this magnitude.”

“They’re the most likely culprits then… in your opinion?”

“In my opinion they are…yes.”

“Whitehall has obviously not had a chance to respond officially to these attacks yet Michael. When they do respond how likely is it that they will also name Abu Sayyaf as the responsible party here?”

“Oh well…they are unlikely to…ahh… speculate at this stage I’m afraid. But I can tell you that this will undoubtedly be the position of the British intelligence services moving forward, and that the…ahh… Filipino government will also be taking this statement from Abu Sayyaf very seriously.”

“Alright, Michael Phelps from the International Institute of Strategic Studies, thank you for coming in.”

“Thank you Manisha.”

That was enough for me. The animal noises coming from the back of my throat were starting to scare people. You ever have one of those moments where you suddenly realise that either you’ve suddenly, inexplicably been granted a super power, or your batshit insane? Of course you haven’t. Which is why when people say, “oh I know exactly how you feel,” I am forced to reply, “like fuck.” No one knows how that feels, except for other crazy people, and the fact that I’m not actually crazy is beside the point. I didn’t know that then and, more importantly, neither did anyone else. I faked a coughing fit and got the hell out of there before someone called building security to have me escorted out.

Mike was sitting in my cubicle with a face like a dropped pie, tabbing from the stock charts, to weibo, over to BBC and back to the stock charts again.

“Just tell me what’s going on with the market Mike, ok?” I told him, “I’m not in the mood for a human interest story.”
“They are already saying that 12 people are confirmed dead.”

“Christ. What did I just say? I said I only want to know how our contracts are performing.!”

“I was giving you context.”

“If I want the context Mike I’ll read about it in Mother Jones for christ sake. What are the stocks doing.”

“Okay, okay sorry. They’re -” he said, then paused, looking at me carefully, “Are you alight Finn? You’re acting a very strange.”

“It’s 7am you pillock. My brain is still in bed next to my bloody girlfriend. I am more than entitled to act a little bit weird. Now are you going to fill me in on the market or not? Either way you can piss off out of my chair.”
I sent Mike home. He was crowding me. Besides, the idea of actually seeing that little Indonesian girl, the one whose leg got ripped off in my dream, alongside the rest of the carnage currently festooning the news, was terrifying; and I had work to do. Dan Dare to the rescue. Time for the pilot of the future to save the universe once more.

All you pious soapdodgers that think enlightenment can only be attained by giving away all your material wealth couldn’t be more wrong. In my experience just moving it from place to place in large enough amounts is at least as effective. Doesn’t turn you into a sprout munching, limp dick hippy either, which is a definite plus in my books.
For a few glorious minutes that morning, I was the disembodied mind of the market floating serenely above the world. Traders, corporations and regulators; all connected by an enlightened web of self interest and I was the spider at the very centre of it all – waiting to swallow up the ignorant and unwary. I took in all the negativity of the day, pushed out the bits I didn’t have time for… the dream, the little girl, my ruined shoes… and I made the world a slightly better place with what was left. For me and for my clients. Until Dave showed up in my cubicle that is, with a bacon and egg breakfast roll in one fist, a cup of takeout coffee in the other and a shit eating grin plastered from one side of his stupid yarpie face to the other, “you dreamed about this didn’t you man? Didn’t you?! You know what this means right?”

“I..I don’t know. I’m busy. You’ve got yolk in your beard.”

“Ag thanks,” he told me, wiping both the egg and the smile off his chops with the back of his hand. “You could be a psychic.”

“I’m not a psychic.”

“You sure?”

“I don’t want to think about it Dave. I’m busy,” I told him and went back to my moving averages.

“Yeah but, imagine if you were though. You could…I don’t know… go on TV or something. Maybe you could go on that American show…what’s it called? Psychic Challenge?”

“I’m not going on Psychic Challenge Dave.”

By Ryan Carter

We were riding beside one another, cutting off traffic. He said, “I want to cut off a piece of your cheek and keep it in my pocket. I can carry it with me.”

He said, “I want to cut off one of your lips and keep it with me.”

I said, “Would you pull out my eyelashes?” He said, “What is the meaning of eyelash?”

I said, “After you pulled out all my eyelashes, you could blow dust in my face? You could tie me up in a chair, and throw dust through a fan, into my face?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Would you enjoy pulling out my fingernails with pliers?”

He said, “Yes, of course.”

I said, “Would you like to cut me all over with tiny pieces of glass?”

He said, “Yes of course. You know that from Qing Dynasty?”

I said, “I’ve seen pictures. They cut off a woman’s tits. Would you want to cut off my nipples and leave the raw part to ooze?”

“Ooze?” But he went on. “I really want to. I would put vinegar on it.”

“Would you like to clip off my D with scissors?” When we were nude together, we’d settled on this hammer of a letter to tenderize the meat.

He said, “I want it more than anything. Cut off your D. I could keep it with me.”

A bridgemouth opened to our right, crossing Suzhou Creek. Before we reached the intersection he hung back and I lost him from my eye. A piece of construction equipment, a bucket, a shovel, perched on a barge and poked around in the sludgy water.

I mean, we really couldn’t get enough. As he pulled up beside me again I asked, “Would you like to throw me in the river?”

“Yes, but that not exciting enough,” he said.

“Would you like to hold me under the river until I stopped moving?”

“What river? I want to do it in the big river. It’s more dirtier.”

Before we had left the museum from which we were cycling home, we had climbed to the sixth floor with its roof terrace. From which we spied the Peace Hotel’s pimply backside and the Waldorf’s ass and the Customs House’s, too. This museum is drawing gashes across its neighborhood. I had asked him there, “Do you want to throw me off the roof? I’d like to throw you off.” He was smaller than me and I reasoned that he would float down.

“To throw you off is more fun. You make a bigger mess.”

Before the museum we had sat a high tea at the Peninsula. His treat: our anniversary, one year. I even let him take pictures of me while I scowled at the others taking pictures and making their pigs-feet picture faces. When they set the dainties on our table I had asked him, “Would you like to poison my tea and make cakes of my eyes?” To illustrate, I pointed at the topmost cake: eyeball-width, crowned with a marzipan peach.

He had said, “Of course,” nonchalantly, “Why not?”

Now I asked, “Do you want to stab me repeatedly?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to cut off my head and feed it to a bunch of dogs?”

“Yes, that is funny to see. Dog head foot ball.”

“Do you want to lock me with no food in a building full of hungry rats?”

“Why I want to do it?”

“So I would either starve, or the rats would eat me.”

“This is better. I will put the juice of duck on your body. It feels good. Are you feeling good, thinking about I am putting juice of duck all over your body, with my hands?” I nodded. “Then I will put you in the house with rats.”

“Would you watch?”

“Do you think I have time to look you when I study university all day? Anyhow I don’t care. We see dead person with bones every day, in university. But I will come get your bones two years later and sell them to my university. Foreigners with big bones, will get a lot of money from university, which wants to teach with you, OK?”

He added, looking purposefully into the sun, “I will put you, tie you, and put you in those places back there, we saw from the museum top. There have rats.”

We slipped on a few cycles more and he added, “Or I can rent apartment. All this,” he nodded at stack after stack of pink and gray apartments, dated to an age of excitement, “they have the girl massage place, the factory, the store for robbering (robbering?” he winced a bit) “and so why not the house for you eating by rats? Anyway I thought that foreigner loving me will make me rich, but you don’t make me rich, even we love, except I sell your bones to university. Foreigners have long legs so their bones very expensive. Then I buy my apartment and give people to live there, then buy more apartment, and I love other foreigner who rich, and mother tell everyone about me, and foreigner marry me in Europe or America, and then,” he said, smiling widely at me.

“You know you don’t want to love anyone but me.”

“Baby,” he said. “I love you, so much. I don’t want to be with anyone else. I see your ear and I want to bite it.” We were gazing at one another. If we were alone in an apartment, we’d be taking off each other’s clothes.

Around a blind wall I winked at him and at the intersection behind it, the squarest of trucks barreled through its right turn. Of course I was killed.

I saw my bicycle mangled. One wheel spun and the other was folded into a chrysanthemum, the flower they call the little asshole, or the other way around. He had disappeared again; it was as if he had never ridden beside me. I knew also how I had been mangled and could see those parts of me hanging outside the skin that was supposed to keep them in: a loop of gut, ripped on some part of the transport. I was puzzling on how I could just, look upon myself like this, and so I knew I had awoken.

He stood with his knees against the bed, flushed and moist from the shower, cupping something precious in one hand. As the world wheeled back upright- last night’s fucking and drinking had knocked it from its axis- I lolled in the juices beneath my back and calves.

I smiled and my face became a shell of pain. I rolled and the sheets stuck to me. It was blood, and rolling I retched, and I kept it down, and my hand found my cheek missing. He had cut off my lower lip, too. I saw dull scissors first glinting in his hand, and then before he lay my meat across my severed lips, I saw the tweezers. Now I know the meaning of an eyelash.

Which comes next. It is strange to remember a dream so well.

By Darcy Fisher

The monster hides in the closet waiting for my lights to turn off because, at that time, it is not seen. Only felt in the winds of darkness, its green eyes peak through the slats defending its status and staring at me when I sleep.  Its big teeth bearing, sharp, as it rubs its bloated Buddha belly growling for my attention.

The monster was first sighted at the market hiding in the aisles of oranges in peak season. The apples stared violently, while customers picked the oranges over them.  “I was always chosen!” said the apples.  “We were chosen over any other since the beginning of man!” the apples muttered.  “Now I am the apple of their eye,” the oranges said with condescension and winked at the apples. The apples pouted, thick-skinned, wakened and bruised. The monster hid in the dark corner of the mom and pop fruit stand on Fu Min Lu laughing, and then vanished in the misty air of morning.

As the sun settled in the afternoon, the monster was seen again browsing the park at People’s Square.  Its transformable body stuck to bright red and pink floral posters advertising single young men and women looking for partners. The monster found it funny how the mothers and fathers swarmed the park greeting other parents who had the same mission which was to marry off my child so they can breed a grandson.  The monster’s foreign face intrigued the grandmother from her busy match making and she invited it for a glass of Jasmine Tea.  They sat on the hard wood benches facing north of the wall of profiles of young bachelors. The grandmother analyzed the monster’s full abrasive beard prickling from its soft green complexion.

To break the ice, the monster held out its whimsical hand “I am Serene, What is your name?”  The grandmother’s eyes stared uncomfortably as she consciously moved her hand to meet the monster. “I am Xaio Ming.”   The monster shook her frail hand and firmly looked into her milky gray eyes, “It is a pleasure to meet you.”  They engaged in small talk. The monster dug for personal information about her life choices and how longevity is built through her children’s success.  The Grandmother saw through the devious gesture.  She pointed her bony erect finger and belligerently scolded the monster, correcting its ethics and judgment and ridiculed it out of the park.

On the first day of the new school term the monster was the first into the classroom. It looked around the room at the new student blazing with a fire- like charm shining silver in the neon overhead lights beating down on her shoulders and hair, blending into the ebony blackboard. It leaped and clenched its long piano fingers onto the young girl’s long fibrous locks swaying in the moving air circulating from breath of the teacher’s patronizing monologue, echoing in the back row making the naughty boys nervous.  Girls in the middle sat at a distance and looked at  the new girl up and down, pacing her face and figure preparing to pounce, as she  maliciously whispered rumors.

The leader of the pack opened her notebook and wrote down criticism aimed to tarnish the new girl’s reputation.  She carefully ripped the note from the notebook and folded it in four even squares and passed under the desk to the next girl who carefully unfolded and read it, shielding the letter with her left hand.  She then took a black ball point pen from her Hello Kittie pencil case and wrote a response looking up at the teacher and pretended to take notes.  Then she folded the note back into the four sections and placed it into her sweaty palm and passed it under the desk to her friend.

The monster’s devious curiosity was overwhelming it had to know what lied inside the folded secret circulating in the classroom.   The monster waited patiently to the letter to be passed and leaped through the spacious classroom and landed on the letter. Then it tucked itself into the folds of the worn threads of the notebook paper feeding off the juicy gossip.  Its body expanded as it feasted on the jealous epidemic passed through the classroom.  One girl after another girl read and passed the note to each intrigued hand until it was tossed into tossed the trash bin where the monster rested in a pillow of secrets.

At this time, the community became nervous and journalists were interested in who this creature was and who was infecting the community with cynicism. The binoculars came out and the community’s radar for the new fad.  The internet was slow from all the school children trying to break down firewalls to read the blog posts that China has blocked.

This phenomenon was now air born and spread across the country infecting every living organism with curiosity.  They were thirsty for more and felt that they were lacking credibility if they were not up to date with the status of who is the green monster was? Where was it hiding and who will it attack next?  An outbreak of fear filled the hazy skies of Shanghai, burning the monsters ears giving it the pain it was craving for.  It watched the world as it become infected by a fantasy of finding the truth of the creature who dominated the social spotlight.  It watched and fed off human insights. It watched their eyes as they dilated with jealousy and smiled at its successful attempt to turn the world into an image of itself.

That’s right folks, time for more tea, check out these lovely little crumpets from our gals D and K below!

Dena Rash Guzman – All the Tea in China

Katrina Hamlin – New Home

By Dena Rash Guzman

The man in the tea shop glances up at us, opening his yellow smile like smog. My hands are hovering over sliced dried lemons. Hovering. A month later, after consumption of those lemons, my mouth will hover over my American toilet.  The lemons were poisonous. So much in China is poisonous. So much anywhere is poisonous. Poisoned. I don’t know yet about the lemons. I’m in the tea shop, wanting them, knowing how long it takes to make them at home in my oven. In my head I hear “Suzanne.”

I am going to bring home tea and lemons all the way from China. I will feed people these things. No oranges. No need. They are too heavy whole and I like California oranges. I like tangerines.

The tea man and his smile are not poisoned and are not hearing Suzanne. Maybe they are. How could they not be? Everything consumable in China is tinged with poison. Oh, melamine, oh protein adulteration. I love the yogurt here though, and sometimes it comes with a Pokemon spoon. Perhaps he’s a vegan. His smile is not poison. At the moment of the smile flash, it is not. My hands hovered over lemons just that hue. Now my hands are flirting with a small tea cup. Now my hands are on statue of Buddha. Now my hands drop a small plastic bag full of egg tarts. The man still smiles yellow nicotine and tea. Why is he so nice? I’m touching everything I see like a child. Don’t touch, don’t touch. Touching it all like it will heal my inherent moribundity. The tea shop is tiny and full of tea and tea accessories. His wife sits in the back at a laptop, typing madly from between giant headphones. She never looks up at us. I wonder if she ever looks up at all.

Camellia sinensis. Tea, all the tea. Not for all the tea. Michelle Tea. Green, black, white, flower. Herbal, medicinal. Ceremony. I don’t need tea but I want souvenirs and I want to go home. Not just to the hotel, but all the way home. All the way to America home. I’m ready. It’s time. My plane departs tomorrow, March 7. The day before my birthday. The Eve of International Women’s Day.

The tea man puts out one cigarette and lights his next. Each to next, each to next. For all the tobacco. Such yellow teeth you have, kind tea shop man. I have no Chinese beyond ni hao and xie xie. Hello, thank you. Hello, thank you.  I’m that sort of traveller. Language makes me shy. I’d be the worst kind of immigrant, speaking the native tongue only in the most dire of circumstance.

For the plant genus, see Nicotiana. For the American electronic musician, see Tobacco(musician). Not to be confused with Tabacco.

I have nothing to do now but pick the dropped egg tarts up and smile back. I want to buy some tea and leave now. I want to go home and shower. We took off into the city early, unshowered and unburdened but are coming back with sacks and sacks of treasure, wearing layers of Shanghai as second skin. City filth is skin and cars and dust and germs and oily residue on the hair. Now he beckons. Now we go to sit, glancing at each other, wondering if this is a tea ceremony scam. We sit on carved wood stools.

Both of us, always wondering if everything is a scam. We are from Shanghai and Las Vegas. We are of grifted universes, where everyone’s a shyster on the lam, and everything always is something of which to be wary.

We sit though, and the man pours us tea. Without mutual language, and with only hand gestures and smiles, he teaches me to make tea with a tiny cup and tinier cups and a lid, straining and straining, and he pours hot water over the tea and sloppily over his wooden table which is ornately carved like a tree covered in lore and mythology. The table has drains. He splashes his hands sometimes. He never winces at the heat. He gives us tea and tea. Not all the tea in China but all the tea we can fathom drinking again for the rest of our cynical lives. He gives us his cigarettes to smoke. He smokes more than he breathes. He won’t take ours in return. Ours are of higher quality but people do settle into brands, don’t they? An hour later, I am hovering over the shopkeeper’s tea bins again, over the dishes. We try to give him money for the ceremony and he won’t take it. It was a strange gift in a side alley in China, like so much is a strange gift. No grift. If not a gift, a gift with purchase. A sales technique. A small grift, perhaps, but a nice one. Sometimes it feels good to be taken a little. That’s the reason people fall.

We leave the tea shop, poison lemon and tea-laden, and I miss my plane the next day. Bad dumplings. Poison. Dirty oil, perhaps. I’m sure it’s not the tea. Tea can’t make you this sick. Right? We are sick. We nearly die. I hold tight to the Chinese plumbing fixtures, sure they will save me from my own mortality. I leave the hotel on March 8, my birthday. International Women’s Day. In China, women traditionally get this day off. In the US, not many realize it’s a holiday at all. I’m light as air, dehydrated, and weaker than watered down tea. I’m saying goodbye, half crazy. I travel blind, lemons and tea, lemons and tea. Tired nearly to sleep, I look down at the dark sea tickling the edge Asia and wonder if I see Jesus walking on the water; no. It’s a tanker full of tea or melamine or Barbie dolls with their perfect bodies. My seat mate, a Baptist preacher from Arizona, tells me we will be taking the long way to the layover in Seoul because North Korea is threatening to shoot planes out of the sky. I settle in, sleeping mask on, and cry. I take it off. I hold a mirror and wipe my eyes and lean back toward home, forever, until the next time, take a sleeping pill with some of the flight attendant’s lukewarm tea and I touch perfect unconsciousness with my mind.

By Lindsay Redifer

Lee is sitting on the newest HP Inkjet in a just a blouse and heels. I frame the shot one more time — the logo has to be nice and clear.

“Lee, move your feet a bit. I need to see those ink cartridges on the desk.”

“Okay!”

God, that voice. It’s like a cat whining into a garbage disposal. I try not to think. Just work. Just do. “Action!”

The printer starts spitting out glossy pictures of female eyes, crystal clear and beautiful on double-bond off-white paper. Lee moans and begins to masturbate wildly.

“Urrrhhhhnnnnoooohhhh!!!! The quality! Oooaarrggghhhh!!!” I shudder, but I seem to be the only one.

Ang, our script girl, stands watching without expression. Ang is Burmese and therefore banished to behind the scenes while Lee moans and grunts in the spotlight. Ang’s big, soft eyes are the same as those spewing out of the printer, over and over and over.
“And cut! Okay, let’s set for scene 8. Someone get Fat Man.”

Lee grimaces as she un-sticks her ass from the surface of the printer. Fat Man, our Canadian, walks in and quickly runs to help her down. He has his shirt off and his shoulder blades are like tectonic plates, shifting.

Fat Man loves to tell me that he’s not really fat. He shows me with his arms and air in his cheeks just how big some of his countrymen can get. I know it’s true, I’ve seen pictures. But, that doesn’t make Fat Man skinny.

Fat Man and Lee put on their Gucci shades and get on to our IKEA set. The crew just finished putting together all the pieces and screwing in the shelves. Please, don’t let it fall.

I refocus, making sure I can see all the brand names. The Party has been very clear about the importance of showing each and every logo. I almost got fired after my first film because I missed the Victoria’s Secret label on a brassiere Lee wore. They were furious.

Fat Man and Lee are in place. She’s bent over an oddly shaped desk and he’s got one knee up on a new office chair. In their shades, in this set, they look like CEOs. I feel dirty just looking at them.

“Action!”

The two of them grunt and pant and sweat. “Oooarrrghhh!!! Your! Gla-sses! Make! Me! So! Wet! Aaaaooonnnhhh!!!”
I asked Fat Man once if he found Lee as irresistible as the rest of China, and he’d nodded, grinning.

“Really? You’re truly attracted?”

He just shrugged. “I can’t explain it. I just want her.”

Oh, well.

We break and send out the babies. They scoot out, not quite crawling, in their cleaning onesies. On the underside of them is a kind of mop attached to the fabric. Everyone on set loves the babies. They all want one to scoot-crawl over to them and they get pretty competitive.

“Look! This one prefers me!”
 “You distracted him from me, cheater!”

Everyone looks away when the ayi comes out to take the mop-babies away and cleans the floor with an actual mop.

“Why do we use the babies?” Fat Man’s face is idiotic with wonder.

“The Party wants to test out the cleaning outfits. They’ve made some deal with a Japanese company.”

“Kind of silly.”

“Nothing the Party does is silly.”

Fat Man’s eyebrows lift, but he says nothing.

Just then, Master Chang walks in and picks up one of the little boys. I’d heard one of them was his son, but you can never be certain. He and his son hug and kiss for a moment, then he turns to me and gives me a nod.

“Director Chen.” The room goes silent. Everyone is staring at me, eyes wide. “Nice work.”

“Thank you. Thank you Master Chang.”

Master Chang turns his attention back to his little son and walks out slowly. Everyone quickly moves out of his way. I get several pats on the back and big smiles from some of the ladies on set. Ang gives me a warm smile that tells me everything I need to know.

I leave the building with Ang, the gray sky swirling around us. Just as we step out a bird falls from the sky, nearly hitting her in the head. We look at the dead, dusty bird for a moment and then walk on.

“That’s the third time that’s happened to me. I must be unlucky.”

“You aren’t.”

She shrugs. “My mother got all the luck in my family. She’s always winning things. And dead animals leave her alone.”

“I’m sure you will inherit some of her luck.”

We go quiet again. Up ahead of us is a Fresh Air by Starbucks booth and we pay the toll then step inside. We just close our eyes and breathe, listening to the recorded sounds playing. The poster on the wall says we are hearing birds singing. I wasn’t aware that birds could sing. What a shame no birds in China can do it.

Lee’s hand creeps up my torso and on to my neck, then my cheek. Her eyes are closed. She puts her head on my chest and takes a big, deep breath, breathing me in. She comes up and looks at me, then gives me a soft, long kiss. My vision blurs when it ends. This fresh air is so strange.

We step out and the heat from the burning piles of rubber hit us in the face. We both grimace and continue walking, my arm around her shoulders. That’s the problem with these fresh-air outlets; they make real air unbearable.

Lee and I continue. I want to take her to a little restaurant I know near my house. I’m starving and I’m sure she is as well. Something about pornographic films makes us all desperate to eat.

We come to a little broken door and I help her step over the carcass of a dead dog. Inside, the lights simulate sunlight, or so they claim. Again, I hear the recorded birds and I take a deep breath, a reflex. I hear Ang do the same and we laugh at one another. Finally relaxed, we sit at a long table and introduce ourselves to the others. There are 30 of them, so this takes quite a while. Master Chang’s approval has made me famous already, eyebrows raise when I say my name.

“Oh? You are the filmmaker? Really? Please, let me buy you a bottle of water.”

The water flows all night, cold and clear. This place is famous for its water. No one knows where they get it and they’re not telling. We order so much we get three bottles on the house and it sloshes around in our bellies. It compliments the vegetables and rice nicely.

Full and happy, I look over at Ang who is chatting with the couple beside her. I want to take her to my tiny apartment, show her my small, condensed life. I want her inside of it, not beside or looking into it. I put my hand on the small of her back

“I’d like very much to take you home. If that’s alright.”

“I don’t know….”

“It’s alright. You don’t have to come. But I would like you there.”

She’s silent for a long moment. I know she has to be careful. As a Burmese woman, she’s often called a slut. I even heard Lee once accuse her of having no control over herself, just like everyone in Burma. I couldn’t believe it; Lee even had others from work on her side, cheering. As far as I know, Ang hasn’t even been on a date since she moved here.

Suddenly, she turns to me and agrees to come to my home. I give her a small hug. The table murmurs a moment of disapproval at our affection, but they let it go. We pay and go out, the broken door falling off its rusted hinges behind us.

At my apartment, Lee stands and looks around. There is the bed in the center, commanding the space. On the wall is my television by Exxon and the medications from the P&G pharmacy. I ask her if she would like a pill and she asks for a digestive. We both take one. Her eyes fall on the bedside table, where I keep the one antique I own.

“What is that?”

“Here, I’ll show you.”

I sit on the bed and pick it up. It’s getting so small; I have to stop using it. I get the box of matches, strike one and light the thin string that comes out the top. Ang quickly runs to turn out the light and we stand at look at the glow filling the room.

“It’s called a candle. People used to use them, a long time ago.”

“Where did you get this?” She comes closer, kneeling in front of me. In this light she looks unreal.

“My grandfather gave it to me. He said he made it himself.”

She looks at me sideways, not believing me.

“Do you think I’m lying?”

“No, I think you are a good man.”

She smiles again, then leans forward and blows out the light.

By Katrina Hamlin

The small blond girl opens the door, and steps out onto the landing. She drags a big suitcase with broken handles. She’s late.
A Chinese man – timid stance, mid-50s – is standing at the top of the stairs.
He is shocked to see a small blond girl on the landing. He spills a “Hello” before he can stop himself.
“Nihao,” she replies, and turns to rattle the keys into the lock. She’s used to her own novelty, and those looks, which come with a reflex “Hello”.
“You live here?” he asks, watching.
“Wo zhu zai zheli. Wo de jia.” She zips the keys into a hand bag, and moves to push past, to the stairs. The plastic wheels rumble on the concrete floor.
He doesn’t move. “This is your home?”
She notices for the first timet that he is addressing her in English, without effort. “Yes. I live here.”
“You live here.”
“I live here.” She looks at her watch, frowns, and tries again to go past him.
“You borrow the room, or you own it?”
“I rent it.” She is trying to angle the broken suitcase past him. He doesn’t move. She can’t pass. He looks like he can’t decide how to hold himself.
She decides there is something wrong with this man. He doesn’t fit. “Do you live here?” she asks.
“I lived here when I was a child.” He points to her doorway. “That is my room. Then we went to America.”
She is surprised, and likes the coincidence. She allows herself to forget she is late and watches him, watching the door. “Do you want to see my room?”
My room?
“Yes…”
She unzips the bag, and rattles the keys back into the lock. The door swings open and the man walks in before her. He acts like he owns it, she thinks. But he doesn’t fit.
He takes in her things, a mess of books and jumpers piled on the sofa bed, a still-warm half-cup of milky English tea on the wooden table.
They are quiet, and the door swings shut.
Then, he strides over to the window. “I used to lean out of this window when I was small, to see the street. My grandmother would shout at me. What have you done with the door?”
“What?”
“What have you done with the door? There was a door here,” he says, pointing at the wall. “They must have filled it in. Do you have water? Running water? Gas?”
“Yes… yes.”
“Can I see?”
“The bathroom’s there, in the corner….”
“A bathroom!”
“Yes… A bathroom.”
He studies the plastic loo seat, the cheap fittings, and the shower curtain with the rain cloud pattern. He looks at the bathroom for three or four minutes.
The girl was curious, but now the man is boring her, and it is her room, and it is time to leave. She checks her watch again as conspicuously as she can, and picks up the keys. The man is staring at the plastic toilet seat, in a reverie. “I have to go,” she says.
“I have to go,” she says, a little louder.
He blinks. “You have to go.” She holds open the door and waits for him to walk out ahead of her, back onto the landing.
She locks the door again and turns to find him holding her case, clutching the broken handles. “I’ll help you.”
“Thank you.”
They go down the stairs together.
“Have you been here since you were a child?”
“This is my first visit in 50 years.”
“Oh.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“I moved in this week.” His face twitches, and she feels him taking possession of the room in his mind. It’s more his than hers; he wants that to be true.
They reach the ground floor, and step outside.“But I’ve been in China longer than a week,” she tries to reassert herself, “Over two years in China”.
He’s not listening.
She is about to say something else, but he speaks over her. “You know what to do now?”
“What?”
“You see that car?” He points down the road. “The one with the lights? That’s a taxi.”
“I know,” says the girl, who was already lifting an arm to wave it down.
“You have to wave it down,” he says.
“I know,” says the girls. The taxi is already slowing, now stopping. He hasn’t noticed or he ignores the tone of her voice. “I live here,” she repeats.
He puts the case on the back seat for her.
She speaks more quickly: “It was nice to meet you. I’ll look after the room. Good bye.”
He nods slowly and closes the door for her as she climbs in. He stands very still on the pavement, watching her through the window as she tells the driver, “Hongqiao jichang.”
“Airport?” he replies.
“Yes, thanks,” she says, and he revs the engine.
But before they can move away, the man is at the window, rapping on the glass, flashing urgent eyes.
She winds down the window, checking her watch again and swearing under her breath. “What?”
“You have to tell him where you’re going.”
“I told him.”
“Tell me where you’re going, I’ll tell him for you.”
“I told him, I’m going to the airport.”
“Shifu, jichang. Jichang. Jichang.” The man is gabbling, and his words sound strange in Chinese, even to her. The driver nods, impatient.
“Zhidao. Airport,” says the driver.
“I have to go,” says the girl.
The man looks at her. “He will take you now,” he says, and steps back onto the pavement.
He watches as the car disappears down the road.
She sits back, and wonders why she didn’t ask more about her room, and what it had been to him.
He watches as the car disappears. Then turns back to his house, and his room.

Tea.

The British love it, the Americans throw it into harbours, Canadians put maple syrup in it, and the Chinese most likely invented it. Whether you serve it with one lump or two, tea has always been “steeped” in history. It is mysterious, sexy, dangerous, and deadly. A lot of people seem to have a lot to say about tea, which is why we here at H.A.L. have devoted an entire groupthink to this most noble beverage.

Sit back, relax,  pour yourself a spot, and enjoy…

Danielle LeClerc – Chinese Tea and the Bone Cup

Ginger wRong Chen – A Perfect Cup of Tea

by Ginger wRong Chen

I am pacing around the house and constantly telling myself “Settle down!” “Easy!” Yet instead, I only feel my throat grows drier; a knot is growing bigger in my stomach, and I check my look over and over again in the mirror for, God knows, how many times already.
Have I got anything right? I’ve tidied up the sofa, the table, the vases on the shelves. I’ve sprayed the mixed aroma of rose and ylang-ylang in every corner of the house, all the places where I suppose me and him will stand, sit, or lie down. And I’ve put on my favorite outfit, the silky one-shoulder draped dress in light blue, if I remember it correctly, he once said light blue is his favorite color.
And the tea I am going to serve is this year’s King of Anxi Tieguanyin. It should be the real deal since it came directly from a wholesome tea farmer in some village in Anxi, Fujian. I remember yesterday how proudly my father told me and my mother that he was finally able to obtain a piece of “the King” and he told the story in such a manner that it is doomed to be awarded “Adventure of the Year” in this family. However, today both my parents are out of town for some colleague’s, can’t remember his or hers, wedding and they are going to be away for the whole weekend. I sure can imagine, when they come home after the wedding, my father is going to be real mad about the missing King, but I don’t care. Every father makes sacrifices on the road of his daughter’s pursuit of romance.
This is the first time I invite this man for tea, I want him to see how much I can glow when I present a full tea ceremony.
I want everything to be perfect.
And I want him to think I am the perfect girl for him, the kind of girl he will think in the way like “Wouldn’t it be great if I could hold her hand and smell her neck.”

For some reason, right at this panicking pacing moment, Yanzi Jiejie surges up to my consciousness after so many years. I haven’t thought about her for a long time. To me, she is always 17. That’s 12 years ago. And now I have already grown into her age.

At the age of 5, I was her little copycat. I learned to talk like her, walk like her, smile like her.
People always asked her about me, “Is that your littler sister?”
She replied, “Yes. She is the cute one, isn’t she?”
The fact is we are never related. She worked at the tea shop next door to my grandpa’s house, where I spent the first seven years of my life. I went to the tea shop almost everyday, not because I was a freak child who liked to drink tea. No, I am all normal. Like every other kid, tea was just too grown-up for my taste then. I was so young and my taste buds were so under developed that all I craved for was sweet stuff, which I have grown to learn that’s the lowest estate in the taste hierarchy; a sophisticated taste has much more appreciation of sour, bitter and any other kind of unpleasant flavors to kids. But I was still young, too young to even know there is high and low levels of tastes. At that tea shop, I only drank sweet chrysanthemum tea. But I hung around there anyway, because I liked to see how Yanzi Jiejie made tea.
I liked to see her pour the hot water into a teapot from a high angle, she called it “Flowing water from high mountain.” I liked to see her slide the lid around the rim of the pot, she called it “Spring breeze touching the face.” I liked to see her make a steady circle of tea pouring above all cups to make them even, she called it “Guangong cruising the town.”
I liked to see the way she closed her eyes when she inhaled the tea aroma from the sniffing cup. I liked to see her extend her hand softly and said to clients “Please enjoy!” And I liked to see her holding the cup with one hand and covering her mouth with another when she drank tea.
She taught me everything she knew about making tea. She taught me there are three phases of boiling water: the first phase of boiling, the bubbles are like crab eyes; the second like fish eyes, the third like ox eyes. To make a good pot of tea, the first phase is too young; the third too old; only the second is perfect. She taught me that before I pour the boiling hot water into the tea leaves, I should count to seven to make the temperature just perfect; a little patience goes a long way. She taught me it is better for one tea pot committing to one kind of tea so the pot can be nurtured to the perfect conditions.

All those small details seemed trivial and tedious to a five-year-old girl. Yet how strange that everything returns to my mind and senses without any sign of warning after so many years. When I put my fingers on the tea pot, the tea cups, the peeing-boy tea toy, when I take the first sniff of the fresh aroma after I open my father’s prize of his biggest adventure of the year. It all just comes back, like it has been slumbering inside me all these years, and for the perfect tea ceremony I am going to serve to the man whom I want to be perfect for, it just wakes itself up understandingly.
Now I understand what she meant by saying, “It matters whom you are making the tea for. It always tastes the best when you are drinking it with someone you like to share your time with.”

As I remember, among all the clients, that was always a big deal when Qiang Gege came. He came to the tea shop every Friday afternoon. So every Friday, Yanzi Jiejie would put on her favorite dress — a long-sleeved one-piece skirt with soft cream laces overlaying beige chiffon. She would also adorn her hair with a lily flower.
Qiang Gege was a tall, thin and amiable young man, of course that was when he smiled. When he was not smiling, his eyes looked steeped in sorrow.
“Why are you sad?” I would ask.
“Just because I am not smiling, it doesn’t necessarily mean I am sad,” said he.
“But you look sad.”
“Don’t be fooled by what you see,” he would reply.
Yanzi Jiejie once said to me, “He looks like a Ru Sheng from ancient times, don’t you think?”
I had no idea what Ru Sheng is, but I nodded anyway. From the way she spoke, it sounded like a good word to me. If that was something bad, she would have said it with clenched jaw and wrinkled nose, like the way when she said, “That man is a bad egg.”
Every time Qiang Gege came, he told us stories that painted a whole new world outside the tea shop: how one of his prestigious professors was challenged by an outspoken freshman girl that the professor had been using the same teaching materials for twenty years; how he and his buddy set up a school newspaper and was shut down two months later when the school declared their newspaper was promoting superstitions only because a cartoon of Fengshui Master was printed; and how he found out most of the girls, even the university ones, couldn’t even tell the difference of two very simple words — “yes” and “no” — and he thought that’s very confusing.
When he talked, Yanzi Jiejie often cast down her soft eyes accompanied by a tender smile hanging around her lips. She listened attentively but rarely said anything.
She would said to me after he left, “How smart he is! He knows almost everything. And he talks in great intelligence and with such charm.”
“Why didn’t you say anything to him?” asked I.
“What could I say to him? He studies in university. I am a girl with little education, all I know is making tea. If I open my mouth, he will know I am just a dull and ignorant person. There must be many interesting and pretty girls in his school.”

There was one Friday, he came with a package wrapped in beige paper and pink ribbon. Accepting the gift from him, she blushed with pleasure; her eyes sparkled with glee.
I cried out, “Open it! Open it!” I was a kid who tend to get a little overexcited.
“Please do open it, see if you like it,” he encouraged her.
She tentatively opened it, pulled a beige dress out of the box. That’s her favorite color and fabric, and it was sleeveless. She never had a sleeveless dress before.
For a moment, I thought I saw her smile vaporizing from her face, but I could be wrong.
“Do you like it?” asked he.
“Yes,” She managed half of a smile. “It’s very beautiful!”
“Try it on! See whether it fits or not,” he urged.
She shook her head.
“Try it on! Try it on!” I was doing the typical overexciting routine.
“I said no!” For the first time and the only time, she raised her voice to me.
Then, “Maybe next time,” she soon went back to her normal soft voice and turned to him half way, “It really is a beautiful dress. Thank you so much! Let me wear it for you next time you come. Is it alright?”
But there was never next time.
The Saturday after that Friday, when I went to the tea shop after my morning cup of soy milk and two deep-fried dough sticks, just like every other day, Yanzi Jiejie was no where to be found. Just like that, she was gone.
The owner of the tea shop said to me, “She asked me to return something to someone called A Qiang. I don’t know who A Qiang is. Do you have any idea?”
I nodded.
Then the owner passed me a package wrapped in beige paper and pink ribbon.
I opened it. Inside it was the sleeveless dress he gave her the day before.
That was that.
She didn’t even say good-bye to me.

Dong…Dong…Dong…Someone is knocking on the door…
He is knocking on my door.
I am pulled back from that Saturday morning 12 years ago.
Before I run to open the door, I check my reflection in the mirror for one last time.
I want everything to be perfect. This is the first time I invite him for tea, the first time I want him to see how much I can glow when I present him a full tea ceremony. I want everything to be perfect. And I want him to think I am the perfect girl for him.
Just at this moment, I become terrified for I spot a snag on my stockings. I narrow my eyes, staring into the mirror, the snag only grows bigger and wider, then becomes the 17-year-old Yanzi in that pretty sleeveless dress Qiang gave her. With tears down her cheeks, she stared at herself in the mirror. And suddenly I go back to be the five-year-old girl sneaking around on that Friday night, looking through the crack of the doors to her room.
Her tears just kept running down, till her shoulders quivered, till she grabbed her burned left arm and rubbed the damaged skin fiercely as if it were the mark of shame to her body… tIll her image finally shatters in my mirror, till the snag on my stockings reappears in my horrified eyes.
I want everything to be perfect. I want to be his perfect girl.
She wanted everything to be perfect. She wanted to be his perfect girl.
Dong…Dong…Dong…Someone is knocking on the door…