Donkey Punch

by W. M. Butler
Being in a long distance love affair is hard work in Shanghai. The distance, the occasional clandestine meetings in hotel rooms across the world. Bali, Bangkok, Phuket, Las Vegas, and in Shanghai. Each meeting a frenzied melding together of fucking, fighting, and making up. Emotions turned up to hard boiled. You go from pure love to lust then hate, spite, fear and finally a numbing tired yawning in your belly when it’s time to leave again. You stumble over yourselves trying to apologize for all the accusations and venom that you’ve been spitting at each other for the past seven days, trying to remember the good times, the coke binges, the walks through ancient Chinese temples built in 1998 where you stopped to fuck in the bathroom, or behind the stage after that event or getting that blowjob on a red-eye flight, spaced out on Xanax and KFC egg tarts. Trying to make sense of all the laughing and the crying and the screaming about not loving each other enough.
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Mongolian Hooker Knife Fight

Photo: Allenying.com

The bar girls pulled out cleavers out from behind the bar. Obviously a mistake had been made, there was going to be bloodshed.

Hans, the CEO of UniCore was in Shanghai. The man had the uncanny ability to work fourteen hour days, learn Chinese, run a multi-billion dollar operation dealing with metals for cellphone components for all of Asia, and yet he found the time to drag me and my uncle Ross — who was the manager of the company’s mainland China branches — into three day sessions of debauchery. We would not sleep in between these “adventures.” We would finish one night of getting wrecked, have a shower, drink a Red Bull, go to work, then meet up to do it all over again.

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The Box

by W.M. Butler

This place is horrible. I can’t have my baby here. Please don’t let me have my baby here! John! Please! — It’s OK. It’s OK. — No, you’re right, you’re right she makes it more beautiful here. Look at her eyes John they’re so brown and her hair, it’s black just like yours. Her fingers and toes John, all there and so wonderfully pink — John.

“…John.”
“Mr. Mori?”
“Wake up.” Continue reading…

Groupthink: Storytellers

We write stuff. That’s what we do. We write and we read and we discuss stuff. That’s what Groupthink is. This week though we decided to go a different route. The route of our forepeeps. We wanted to get our olden timey on and do the whole “sittin'” by the fire telling tales thang”, and so we did. But HAL style.

Instead of a camp fire we sat around a table laden with cheep booze, getting hammered and chain smoking cigarettes of questionable authenticity. Yup, twenty people crowded around the tables at Crocus telling true tales. Real live stories! None of that fiction crap the kids are so crazy about these days. So sit back and enjoy these recordings from our evening of storytelling.

Oh, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any sweeter HAL is putting together the first ever Storytelling Event in Shanghai this coming October! We are looking for Storytellers, Musicians of all kinds along with Artists, illustrators, painters  and digital artists to join HAL in putting together an event that combines all these elements in a celebration of storytelling. Interested in joining? Email us at butler@haliterature.com

Click on the links below to listen to Groupthink live storytelling!

W.M.Butler: Extra Cracky KFC

David Hampson: Declare Your Pork Pies

Kitty Harlow: Mum, Dad, an Arabian Prince and an unspecified amount of Cocaine (We withhold, for now, from you this brilliant piece, it will instead be performed live in Shanghai soon by beautiful Kitty, stand by for updates on HAL events).

Check out more Groupthink storytellers.

Readings From the people’s republic of

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Author Spotlight: W.M. Butler

W.M. Butler

W.M. Butler is from Calgary, Canada. He was once a poet but now is a short story writer. He is currently being coerced  into writing a novel. He’s freaked out but happy that his work appears on H.A.L.’s website and ShanghaiSquared. Currently a short story of his is being adapted for the screen as a short film. W.M. Butler is currently working on his first collection of short stories due for publication later this year… or next.

W.M. Butler’s featured stories:

The Adventures Of Brute Noir: A Tall Tale (new)

I’m Steel, Baby

Five Questions for W.M. Butler

HAL: What time is it?

WMB: Um, like 4 AM.

HAL: What do you do when you’re not writing?

WMB: Feel guilty for not writing.

HAL: What made you want to pick up a pen?

WMB: Someone told me there would be chicks. I’ve always wanted a baby bird of my own but there was this… incident when I was three years old…
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The Adventures of Brute Noir: A Tall Tale

by W.M. Butler

From the beer parlours and speakeasies of Saskatoon to the opium dens and chop suey joints of old Shanghai, it was whispered that Brute Noir had been born to a Parisian whore. She had been sold to fur trappers in the wilds of Quebec for two wolf pelts and a rabbit skin cap. People said she escaped and traveled on foot across the great expanse of the Canadian wilderness to the base of the Rocky mountains.  Half starved and ragged from her journey, she knew she would never make it up the cold jagged passes of the mountains on her own. It is said that she was found at crossroads by a man whose past was as misty as the great cloud capped peaks of the Rockies themselves. The tales say that she bedded him for his assistance up into the Crow’s Nest Pass. The stranger led the way and once they had reached the pass the man disappeared and left her heavy with child.

Brute was born high up in the stone cold crags of those mountains in the dead of winter during the biggest snowstorm of the century. When the squalling babe was finally birthed near the banks of a vast frozen lake. Rumour was that he came out with hair curly and wild like his mothers but not of the same colouring. Hers was hair of spun gold but due to the extreme cold the babe had hair as blue black as a raven’s wing. When the light caught it just so, it shone a true indigo. Brute’s eyes were the colour of the icy lake he was born beside all stone cold grey shot through with icy veins of the bluest blue. Some even say if you look deep into the eyes of Brute Noir you can see the clouds dragging their bellies across the surface of that lake. Still other’s say if you look deeper still, you can see into the depths of that lake and down into the roots of the mountains of the rocky range. Continue reading…

A Bruise

by W.M. Butler

I can hear them through the walls, making love. They do not sound like us. They sound different, the noises they make are alien. They are not like us. I will listen to them while laying in bed, on my back, resting my head on folded arms. Sometimes when I hear them start, I will stand up and pace back and forth along my room, along the wall where I believe the sounds come from. I will find the point which is loudest, that magnifies their cries. I will place my hands flat on the concrete wall, I will press my naked chest to the wall, I will rest my ear to the wall. The wall is cold, I can sense the thickness of the concrete by touch alone. I do not know how sound carries through such a dense material but it is so, in Chinese buildings, sound carries in strange ways. I know that these people are foreign but I do not know where in the building they live. It could be five floors above me and on the opposite end of the building. Their sex carries through the hallways and stairwells of the building like a haunted sound,  the dead calling out to the living. I shiver when I think this way, I whisper little prayers to keep the dead where they live, so they do not visit me. Continue reading…

The End…

by W. M. Butler

I lay naked beneath the outer ring road, in one of the mini gardens placed along the elevated roads by The Shanghai government. The gardens and the green belts that line the roads out to the Pudong airport served three purposes that I knew of. One was to beautify an otherwise long and uninteresting journey out of the city, the second to hide the poverty of the rural countryside from arriving foreigners entering Shanghai, and finally to improve the airflow and ease the pollution caused by constant blistering streams of traffic that came and went. The pungent scent of clover and drone of bees mixed with the slicing hum of consistent engines muddying my ears.  A momentary lull in traffic like a slow winding down clock settled over everything and covered me. It had to end this way; PeiPei had killed me. She hadn’t held the gun but she pulled the trigger; her betrayal, my murder, it was the same thing. I couldn’t hate her for it I couldn’t hold a grudge. It all played out exactly how it had to. The key around my neck was gone, the location of the door it opened and the room’s contents would be denied Zhang forever. I never told him anything he could use. When he finally discovers that the information I gave him was nothing more than a diversion. A last tile tossed on the table so that Xu had the time he needed to disappear, Zhang would be angry. Let him be. By the time he figured it out and came back here in the hopes of dragging what he needed to hear from me I would already be dead. Continue reading…

Hard Seat from Shenzhen to Shenyang Chapter 3

Middle Kingdom Field

by W.M. Butler

The old woman chuckled as the white girl got off the train, lugging her friend’s bag off onto the empty spit stained platform to stand staring aimlessly about. The train lunged forward a few jarring feet before finding its momentum, with the lurching grind of the engine, the old woman tapped the window with the baijiu bottle, the girl turned to watch as the grandmother screwed off the cap, held the bottle aloft, smiling and swigged the dregs down.

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