Press for H.A.L. Publishing, its writers, its new book, MIDDLE KINGDOM UNDERGROUND and its events. Check it out, and while you’re at it, check out The Shanghai Tunnels Project. Get involved!

Enjoy Shanghai : HAL Publishing (MKU Launch and SLAMHAI 3!)

The World of Chinese: Bjorn Wahlstrom on guerilla publishing

That’s Magazine : MKU Review

Vimeo MKU book Trailer

MKU: Press Release

Asian Cha: Dena Rash Guzman and MKU/River South Arts Festival

Pipe Dream Publishing: two articles -
MKU/Book Launch and interview with DRG

INTERNATIONAL VIDEO POETRY FESTIVAL

HAL and UNSHOD QUILLS have teamed up with Portland’s Monica Storss to produce a cross-cultural, trans-Pacific video poetry film festival. Hosting bi-lateral events in Shanghai and Portland, the festival will celebrate the spoken word as infused by the medium of film, promoting and connecting artists from around the world.

Shanghai and Portland, Oregon have more in common than meets the untrained eye. Dark, busy, and both studded with Shanghai tunnels (those in Portland were used in the insidious pursuit of many illegal activities, including the kidnapping of young men for use as slave sailors on the Pacific; Shanghai’s own tunnels transport people in cars beneath the river to do whatever the hell they want). Both cities are divided by a river of trade and both cities are booming with literary communities as vibrant as anywhere else in the world. Both cities lay claim to Unshod Quills and HAL Publishing, sister sites and companies united in the pursuit of promoting excellent art and literature the world over.

$300 USD (RMB 1900) Grand Prize – Judges Choice for Best Video Poem – Second and Third Prizes – Screening Events in Shanghai and Portland, Oregon – Publication on HAL and Unshod Quills –

Guidelines and Submission forms after the jump.

$300USD (1900RMB) GRAND PRIZE – SECOND AND THIRD PRIZES – DINNER AND BOOKS – more TBA

HAL Publishing, (www.haliterature.com) independent English language publisher based in Shanghai, China and Unshod Quills, (www.unshodquills.com) a Pandemic Journal of the Arts and Letters based in Portland, Oregon, in cooperation with Monica Storss (www.monicastorss.org) of Portland, Oregon announce the first ever SHANGHAI TUNNELS PROJECT — AN INTERNATIONAL POETRY FILM FESTIVAL.

With screening events to be held during March 2012 in both Portland, Oregon and Shanghai, China, this festival will celebrate the art of video poetry—the mix of verse and video into a creative form all its own.

Between now and February 22, 2012, poets and video artists are invited to submit a video poem for entry into the festival. Initial judging will be conducted by editors from HAL Publishing and Unshod Quills.

Eleven finalists will be chosen. Three must reside in Shanghai and three must reside in Portland; remaining finalists may be from anywhere in the universe.

Finally, an international panel of five independent judges will select the grand prize winner from a group of eleven finalists. Two judges will be Shanghai-based, two will be Portland-based and one will be based elsewhere.

Those eleven finalists will be featured at events screened live in Portland and Shanghai where audience members will be provided with a chance to vote for their city’s second and third place choices. There will be only one grand prize winner, but there will be two second and two third place winners.

Grand prize winner will be announced prior to the event

GRAND PRIZE: One winner will be awarded $300 USD/ 1900 RMB

SECOND PRIZE: (LOCALS ONLY) one artist based in Shanghai and one artist based in Portland will be awarded dinner and drinks for two at a local restaurant (Shanghai) or at UQ editor Dena Rash Guzman’s delightful pastoral home, Stargazer Farm in Sandy, Oregon (Portland.) One copy for each winner of HAL’s newest publication Middle Kingdom Underground will be awarded.

THIRD PRIZE: Two finalists, will receive a collection of books from HAL Publishing and other sponsors.

ALL FINALISTS WILL RECEIVE PRESS, PROMOTION OR PUBLICATION BY UNSHOD QUILLS AND HALiterature.

(All prizes are subject to change depending on sponsorship, but the minimum guaranteed GRAND PRIZE will be a minimum of $300.)

SHANGHAI TUNNELS CONTEST RULES AND REGULATIONS

• For the purposes of this competition and festival, video poetry is defined as a piece of film or video based around a poem. Therefore, entries must be a video or film and it must feature either some form of poetic text or spoken word.

• Video poetry entered into the contest is not to exceed five minutes in length.

• Each contestant may enter one (1) video poem.

• Videos may have been previously published, but they must reasonably be the property of the contestant. Collaborations between filmmakers and poets are welcome, but failure by the contestant to ensure both parties are willing to submit the video will result in disqualification. Further, any copyrighted material of any length or media not belonging to the contestant or his/her collaborator is strictly disallowed. By entering the contest, the participant agrees to relieve Shanghai Tunnels and its associates of all responsibility for ensuring work is legal to disseminate and that all parties owning rights to the video have been notified of entry.

• Contestants may live anywhere in the world. However, three Shanghai and three Portland based artists will be chosen in the preliminary round.

• There is no entry fee.

• Contestants may enter by completing an entry form providing a link to a hosted video poem to the email addresses provided for this purpose. No files will be accepted. Vimeo and Youtube, for example, are acceptable formats for initial entry.

• Finalists will be notified by March 1. Finalists will have five days to submit their work via an electronic file sharing system to the contest holders. A method will be assigned when finalists are announced. Failure to do so will disqualify finalist from the contest.

• Employees, family members, domestic partners, editors or board members of HAL Publishing, Unshod Quills or Monica Storss Publicity are ineligible to enter.

TO ENTER:

SHTPentry form doc

Please fill out and return this entry form by February 22 to both dena@haliterature.com and butler@haliterature.com.

enter ST SUBMISSION into header to ensure the proper delivery of your entry for the competition.

Please contact Wendy at unshodquills.com with any inquiries or questions. Thank you! Good luck.

By Robin Silver

Cut in half, with a spoon, immersed in a wartime movie. The Great War is best, followed by Vietnam, but any will do. Hopefully, there will be at least one passionate kiss before you hit the rind.

Off a paper plate, sliced in triangles, fingers of your writing hand grasped around the green, the other hand under the table, to hide the discreet reserve of seeds.

Sucked through a straw placed in a hole carved with a penknife and spit into the trash can. Carefully, so as not to ruin the integrity of the rind. It is the best bong you’ve ever smoked.

In the fifth grade, on a class picnic. Jeremy, who everyone calls Germy, who sits across from you in math, tells you that if you swallow the black seeds a watermelon tree will grow inside your belly. You tell him that watermelons don’t grow on trees. It is years before you drunkenly make the connection between “seed” and something else, quite similar in size to a watermelon, growing inside your belly.

While nude, in bite-size pieces brought to you by room service eaten, suckled really, out of your lover’s fingers in a soft, downy all-white bed.

Off a tiny golden fork at a fancy party. Some juice sneaks down your chin and you can’t get to the napkins without passing people whose opinion of you really matters. You feel shame. You shouldn’t.

Alone on a hot Sunday night, in the kitchen of a penthouse apartment in a foreign country, as you can hear the strains of a singing competition from the TV in the other room. American Idol in Chinese? you think, chewing slowly. Not American. Stupid. You swallow a seed, coughing softly.

Spooned greedily from the inside of a pail into your mouth, sitting on a mountaintop, wearing a dress made of a fabric that you don’t know what it is but you do know that it is itchy as hell. Wait, isn’t this the dress your sister wore to her bat mitzvah? What the fuck is going on? You wake up in a cold sweat, still tasting the juice on your lips.

With a ghost.

Grilled.

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

Second Annual Shanghai Erotica on the Bund

Good news kids and kiddets, It seems that we are back for another swank evening of erotic readings at the Glamour Bar this coming February! HAL has been asked to send the word out to our writers.

We want you to produce some bad ass erotica for the event! Check out the deets and get your literary engines purring!

Submission Guidelines

1.) Shanghai based Erotica

(We want erotica not letters to Hustler, wiki erotica if you don’t know what it means or check out some of the links provided for you below of some of HAL’s past writers doing their erotic thang.)

2.) 1000 Word limit

3.) Justified margins, 1.5 spacing, font times new roman in a WORD.DOC

3.) Send all submissions to butler@haliterature.com

4.) At the top of the Word.doc include name, 60 word bio, and contact details.

5.) Deadline Feb 15th by 11:59PM

6.) Subject line of email should read HAL SUBMISSION-EROTICA-AUTHOR NAME

Expect to experience a great evening and event. This event is being put on by Glamour Bar, Thats Mag, HAL and some other big hitters so if your story is selected expect to see some love around the interwebs and all around Shanghai!

Get writing!