Some Time Has Gone Since
Parthosarathi

.......Inspiration trickles down a lost link desperately trying to hold on to. Inspiration is dead in a reality as consuming as cancer. Eating the soul from within. Gnawing at it like menacing rodents gone rampant with plague.......

.......The silvery moon hanging in anticipation at a quiet western horizon. Moonlight blues and silver fairies making love by the dancing stream. Streams and cascades caressing the mountain slopes, awaken in the shadows of a silent night. Contemplating a mood that stirs strings of a faint nostalgia. Southern stars, bright with a soothing brilliance, trying to communicate. Posing questions, eternal queries about the nature of beauty, the implications of life.......

.......Then there are the tears. Heavens look upon and nod in helplessness. Wandering souls, burning amber within, a cold impassivity on the surface. Passions running high, but with not the remotest inkling of the vents. Vents to release the rapid retrograde. Only a weltering wilderness to wallow over. A wilderness that once had inspired love in its greatest manifestation. Only to sit back and stare at fading snapshots from an anonymous album.......

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Fong Wang's Book of Songs
Charles Tarlton

CARMODY
Did you see John Wayne in “The Wake of the Red Witch?”

BLIGHT
Junks and seamy deals in the Shadows of old Hong Kong.

Fong Wang came to San Francisco on a budget Air China flight from Hong Kong. He turned up at San Francisco Human Services applying for general assistance, at first even pretending he couldn’t speak English. Granted temporary support, he moved into a small apartment that was rented out to twenty other homeless Chinese men at the same time.

FONG WANG
Into this nest of flesh-eating devils threatening to bite, I have fallen.

Bai Gu Jing*
I am grinding my fiend teeth on your dying bones.

Fong Wang only sporadically looked for work; from the start he seemed sort of odd. He would suddenly break away from a conversation and start talking excitedly to an imaginary interlocutory in a dialect that sounded a lot like Japanese. He would pump his fists rapidly around in the air.

He spent most of his free time on the Embarcadero. He didn’t panhandle, stumble around drunk, or sleep half-naked sprawled across cement benches. Whenever I saw him, he was dancing. In the middle of the long walk between Piers 3 and 39, from the Corn Dogs kiosk to the Ferry Building, he would occasionally stop, perform a fouetté en tournant, and then step out ahead, one leg kicked high up in front, like a drum major. Then, he’d stop and chant rapidly, drop to his hands and knees and arrange little jade icons from his pockets in circles on the sidewalk.

FONG WANG
Little devil gods who know how to dance. If I throw them into a grave, they twirl and dig themselves out.

Bai Gu Jing
Put away your canes and carved gods. You cannot kill me. Hit me, I rise up!

I often saw Fong Wang dodging through the streams of real people on the street, all the while he flailed at the ghostly monsters in his head. He was undergoing some kind of deterioration, that was for sure. He grew an exiguous beard, like an ornamental Mandarin, his skin darkened from the dirt he lived in, and his clothes were worn to rags. He would still stop here and there to do his little dance and ritual.

As if he could no longer separate ghosts from real people, he began occasionally to accost German or Italian tourists from the cruise ships, and jabber accusingly at them in his incomprehensible patois. Some of the tourists would step closer, trying to make out what he was saying, but most lurched away in fear.

FONG WANG
You see this stick? I will beat you to death with it, again and again!

Bai Gu Jing
I am come to eat the flesh of all gweilo!**

He got into the habit of rushing up to tourists sitting in front of Starbucks, snatching away their coffees, and taunting them in his wild talk. Once, I saw him screaming after an older woman, who couldn’t get away fast enough; he followed her, raging. Such episodes became more frequent until, one foggy morning, near where the red-and-white Bar Pilot Boats were docked, he snatched the purse of a frantic Australian nun. A police cruiser just happened to be passing. It ran up onto the sidewalk and both policemen came out swinging batons.

To give Fong Wang full credit, he did fight back, striking his drum major pose more than once, and twirling. The police interpreted his dance as some mysterious Karate and beat him into utter submission. They hit him long after he had become still, then they threw him into the back seat of their patrol car, fired up the siren, and roared off.

FONG WANG
The demons are crowding around to eat my flesh!

Bai Gu Jing
Beware! I have come in many garbs, the silk of the senses, the hard iron of battle!

*Bai Gu Jing is a shape-shifting demon, often depicted as a skeleton.
** Foreign devils.

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The Estate
Frances Gapper

Extensions are built, attics converted, double glazing installed. Old people die, houses change hands. New developments cluster around the tube station. The greengrocer, the butcher and the paint and hardware shop all close and are replaced by charity outlets; people shop at the big Asda, or at Marks & Spencer Simply Food. The century turns.

Killing foxes is illegal, but some people hide poison in black plastic bin bags. Put out on Sunday nights with the recycling, the bags are often torn open, littering the street. The council introduces a new bin system.

Then war comes, then plague. Huge rats, a hail of dust. Most people die quickly. At last everyone is dead.

An orange moon. Shrieks in the wind. Broken gutters, smashed windows, doors hanging off their hinges.

No more original features or new things, no schools, shops, TVs, computers, no electricity or gas, no piped water, no comforts of life, no human life. Soon the houses will be gone, the estate a wasteland.

Another turn of the century, this time nobody is keeping count.

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Redemption
Susmita Bhattacharya

Bala slipped in through the window. It had been rattling in the wind, advertising the opportunity. His belly rumbled. He hadn’t eaten ever since he had been on the run. The fuggy smell of the kitchen heightened his hunger. Carelessly he flung open cupboards and found some bread. He stuffed it into his mouth, almost suffocating himself. Then he heard a moan from the other room. He stopped and listened. Another groan. It sounded exactly like her, when he left her on the floor, bleeding to her death. Was it her ghost, come to haunt him? He chewed silently, and eyed the contents of the fridge. He tiptoed towards the sink, where the kitchen knife lay, gleaming in the moonlight.

He would kill again. He was not going to rot in some prison. She had asked for it, that woman. She hid his money, preventing him from buying alcohol. But when she ran away with her lover, his mind exploded. People sniggered when he stood at the public tap to collect water. Where was his wife? Warming someone else’s bed? He hated their intrusive eyes and their razor-sharp tongues. She would pay for the insults. He found her bending over her lover’s cooking pot and stabbed her from behind. But she turned and saw him before life oozed out of her. Serves you right, he spat and left her, blood collecting beneath her, moaning, groaning till finally she ran dry. He jumped on the night train and fled. For days he travelled, hungry and wary. They would come for him, unless he was smart enough to avoid them.

His hand trembled as he held the knife. There was the groan again. His scalp bristled with tension. What was happening here? He tip-toed to the other room. In the moonlight, he saw a man sitting on the bed. He was leaning forward, clutching his chest. Perhaps it was a trick to corner him. He held the knife tighter and approached him.

The man saw him and looked relieved. Help, he mouthed again. His face was streaming with sweat. His hands tore at his soaked kurta, his face contorted.

Bala stepped back. What was wrong with him? He put the knife down and went closer. He touched the man’s forehead, which was damp and cold.

“Doctor,” the man whispered hoarsely.

Bala understood now.

He could just let him die and loot the place, he reasoned. Why should I care? But the man stared beseechingly at him. He found a telephone, but what would he say? He didn’t know the address, or the man’s name. The police would find him. He must run. He turned. The man had collapsed on the bed.

The ambulance arrived and carried the man on a stretcher. Bala watched from a distance. He was proud of himself. Maybe he had absolved himself of his wife’s murder by saving this man. The window rattled in the wind. His stomach rumbled. There was food in that fridge. But there was also the diamond ring and watch he had pocketed. Those would keep him going for a long time.

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At Dawn
Kristina England

A woman cries in her car. She is broken down, in need of repairs. If you started her up again, you would find the sound of her muffler could be heard for miles.

Yes, her husband installed a silencer years ago. He made her run smoothly. He made sure there were no issues with her mechanics, but he scratched her up bad in the process.

Only now does she realize how much exhaust was really running through her, how much internal combustion was being filtered out.

Only now does she realize she likes the sound of her own vibrations.

But questions remain: Is it too late to start from scratch? Is it too late to buy the right parts? Rebuild herself? To turn the key and drive on? To not look back?

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