They’re everywhere. On billboards atop highways. On humungous portraits adorning the facades of every public building.
They’re ubiquitous as the heat and sun. They appear sometimes as young, virile.
Other times with a touch of gray. But They are always beatific and bathed in favorable hues. Often They are with small cute canines perched on Their laps.
Despite attempts to frame Them as benevolent, They are concealing fangs. They are drinkers of blood.
Who are They?
They are the Vampires.
The Vampire Dynasty.
Their origins are typical. They arose through ancient violence and powered into alpha parasites.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The Vampires grow exponentially. Like nests of cockroaches. Or swarms of mosquitoes. The Vampires are a species between cockroach and mosquito. And anyone with the right tint can fuck into Them.
The Vampires dwell in palatial palaces, while Their hosts are sardined in tin shacks, riverside hovels, and stacked boxes of tiny apartments. The Vampires’ hosts walk on dirt floors and trade time for food and plastic while the Vampires’ toes touch cold to marble floors. The hosts snap selfies while the Vampires are always sitting at graceful angles.
The Vampires are sentient as snake gods…
The Vampires’ servants must crawl in Their presence; literally, servants on their bellies, like obsequious, circus-trained amphibians, slithering and sniveling. Their hosts, as well, must bow to the Vampires’ feet, crawl before them, prostrate in obeisance.
The Vampires maintain Their stranglehold through landownership. Through ancient violence, plunder, rape and conquest, They’ve cut open and seized possession of the expanse. But were They Vampires before the blood? History is subjective. And Their history is a painting of a painting. A picture of a picture.
The Vampires collect blood through taxes. The Vampires’ faces occlude deeds and They collect blood through stakes in State enterprises. They maintain Their blood supply through fear, subjugation, and silence. Through laws governing remarks and criticism. It’s not just how They feed. It’s how They thrive.
The Vampires’ land is a golden nation, a nation of the sun. But it is a hobbled nation. A nation so destitute its police must live on bribes. The Vampires’ is a sick
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer nation. A nation in hospital gowns. A nation stuck with syringes and tubes. The nation’s blood sucked daily through the Vampires’ network of darkened temples.
One might think the Vampires live in a bubble. That They only know luxury. And of course They do and They do. However, the Vampires also live in a perpetual state of fear. They live with gooseflesh. Their dreams are recurring nightmares. The Vampires’ fear hangs heavily over Their heads, hangs low like black clouds fat with rain. Theirs is a necrotic fear, a fear that Their hosts, the masses, the blood supply, will shake Them off, flip over the Vampires’ silver chariots and diamond-plated palanquins and drive jade stakes through the Vampires’ darkly plump hearts.
The Vampires know this. The Vampires are educated in a way the masses are not.
The Vampires read books when the masses do not. The Vampires are aware of history. The Vampires know of the guillotine. They know of exile. So They guard Their blood like a grizzly bear guards its cubs.
For years, the Vampires have drunk blood, unimpeded, with little to no dissent.
However, Their hosts, the masses are awakening. The masses are discovering hematology. The masses are becoming phlebotomists. The masses have interconnected microscopes, are counting cells, and are looking for transfusions.
The Vampires know Their time is limited. So They have begun escape plans. They have begun offshore blood banks. They are shipping the masses’ blood off under thick inky skies, in clandestine, cloak and dagger transfer operations. The Vampires have conspirators. The Vampires have disguises, passports, golden parachutes, machine guns, tanks, trampolines, helicopters, pogo sticks, submarines and emergency call options at the ready.
As of now, it’s unclear what the Vampire Dynasty’s future will hold. But whatever it is, it will involve blood.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer BIG WAVE
The fishermen had set out early, right before the sun rose from the bottom of the sea… The ship’s ragtag crew in sun-bleached clothes already showing blotches, big beads of sweat dripping down their necks…
Reeling in net after net of fish, the men threw and poured bucketloads of the slippery creatures into an assortment of containers lining the longtail boat’s deck…
The oldest of the fishermen, Uncle Yai, swung his gaze toward the sea. Sniffing at the sea air’s salty breezes, he had a premonition. He’d noticed a certain ripple in the water. The seawater getting murky, foaming like saliva… Then he threw back his head to inspect flecks of glue-colored clouds congealing, darkening to a purpose. The clouds fat, fast, and forming into an inky being, a mass of black vapors and thunderheads beginning to eat away at the big blue box of sky above…
Age was respected on the boats, so the crew heeded Uncle Yai’s warning.
Gathered speed. Their task taking hold of the men like a fever. The fishermen picking up the pace as it was becoming clear today’s fish flow would be fantastic thanks to the impending burst to come from the collecting skies. The men grunting, wiping sweat from their creased brows, hanging over the edge of the wooden longtail boat, twisting at ropes stirring the sea. The wiry men, with skin worn as an old couch, jerking out net after net stuffed thick with trembling, dripping wet clumps of fish.
Thankfully, the fishermen beat the rain. Beat the storm. Or so they thought.
They’d docked their boat and had been unloading their booty when the rain announced its arrival with a thunderclap. Then the fat black clouds opened, unleashing a shower of rain that swept over the beach like a long mop and was soon rattling over the village’s tin roof shacks.
Sheets of rain washed over the men in waves, and Uncle Yai dropped his greasy fishnet, ran right through the downpour, dashing down the dock. Then he mounted his motorcycle and peeled out, rode furiously, riding through rising puddles and liquefied roads up toward a semicircle cluster of green hills dense
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer and dark with vegetation. He wished to be as far from the sea as possible. Just in case the sea wished to again push forward its fists of water…
It’d been 16 years since the big wave. That Wile E. Coyote moment. When the Earth below him disappeared. Just as he’d been atop a palm tree, picking coconuts. He’d latched onto a piece of debris, kicked and maneuvered over to a rooftop. There he spent the worst day of his life watching that angry arm of ocean, that wreck, that wretched wall of water and all the awful chunks of concrete, bodies, livestock, cars, buses and boats forced forward… Uncle Yai hearing the wails, cries for help… That horror show… The worst day…
And now the rain was roaring. Mere wrinkles in the sea’s surface turning to tall waves… Waves slapping further ashore… Waters rising from the ground while also falling from the sky… The high winds whipping, ripping palm fronds, flying branches, tattered leaves… The dark skies and raging sea howling back and forth at one another in grim harmony, a horrible duet…
There hadn’t been any rain, for months, on the island so its parched ground was like an empty bathtub, collecting the rainwater, seawater, letting it pool and rise.
Quickly, arms of water were reaching onto the shore, forming flash floods, and breaking through the island’s sunbaked crust, funneling through the village square, rejoining the island to sea.
The townsfolk, fishermen had run for shelter once the heavy rain hit. But the fishermen hadn’t time to collect their spoils. The ship’s crew had huddled atop a shophouse roof and were watching haplessly as their catch, their fish, still thrashing in buckets, floated up and spilled into the storm surge’s flow… The fish sucked back to the sea’s circulation… The fish seeming to smile as they swam off…
Uncle Yai brushed back a tuft of wet black hair from his forehead. Watched warily from the jungle hills as the storm surge pulled back like a wet carpet. Then the canopy of black clouds covering the sky receded. The sky shifting fast from darkness, to milky, to crystal clear. Then Uncle Yai sighed, shading his eyes with his right hand as he inspected the farthest reaches of the sea, that wilderness of water. But he found no trace of a massive wave.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer FANG FANG’S FRIEND
Ghosts had always been a part of Fang Fang’s life. Her grandmother was a medium, and villagers would flock to their family’s countryside home, prostrate and beg for news from the spirit world. As a small girl, Fang Fang would watch the ceremonies and animal sacrifices, live chickens’ throats slit open, and she served as a flower girl for ghost weddings.
It was a gift that ran in the family. The ability to see, hear, and even smell ghosts.
It’d only passed through the maternal side, yet her mother had escaped it.
Probably for the better. While some might find it a blessing, to be able to communicate with the beyond, for Fang Fang, as she began encountering spirits, it felt like more of a curse.
The spirits she saw were never happy. They were angry ghosts, hungry ghosts.
Ghosts of those who’d died in accidents. Panicked souls who didn’t even know they were dead and were lost in the purgatory realm of the spirit world, the coffin-wide space between life and death.
At around three or four years of age she’d started seeing faraway figures, bodies missing arms, shadowy creatures limping, circling the rice fields, flickering in corners… The phantom forms soon finding her night and day, to the extent she couldn’t tell nightmares from reality.
Fortunately, Fang Fang’s grandmother knew exactly what was going on…
As a child, Grandma found the same frightening faces. Had also seen forms in the darkness. Had often awoken to a freezing cold room, seen ghastly figures with bloody, beaten faces pointed at her… Her nostrils flaring with the heavy scent of fear swirling in the icy air…
On a foggy winter morning, Grandma took a five-year-old Fang Fang into the courtyard behind their house. As the two sat on a stone bench, in that cold patina of smoke-colored fog, Grandma perched little Fang Fang atop her lap and explained the “gift,” the ability to see spirits.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The precocious Fang Fang listened carefully, hanging on every word leaving her grandma’s lips, each word exploding into a tiny white cloud that melted into the cold mist.
Then her grandma fished something clanky from out of her coat pocket. An amulet. A gold necklace, with a thin, egg-shaped pendant. On the pendant was an engraved image of a chubby, happy Buddha.
“This will keep you safe from the spirits,” her grandmother whispered into Fang Fang’s ear and carefully pulled the necklace over the child’s tiny neck, hooked the clasp.
Fang Fang had been born into an impoverished family residing in the countryside of Zhengzhou.
She was one of the “left behind” children. Both her parents had left their village to seek work in the city, and she’d been raised by her grandmother, the medium, plus a network of village aunties and uncles.
From a young age, in addition to helping with ghost weddings, receiving guests, she’d also assisted her grandmother in the fields, digging, planting crops. Dirt was always under the child’s fingernails.
Out in the rice fields she’d be accompanied by ghosts. But after receiving the protective amulet from her grandmother, the worst of the ghosts, the hungry ghosts, angry ghosts, began to fade further into their distance… Though she could still sense the glares…
It was shortly after receiving the amulet that she had a welcome visitor. Xiao Mei.
A young girl around her age. The two had met in the rice fields and immediately hit it off, talking about their favorite salty snacks.
Xiao Mei seemed so optimistic about the future, spoke of moving to the city, and she’d talk at length about the requirements she had for the boy she’d marry.
For several months, Fang Fang saw the girl, every day, in the rice fields. But after the harvest, Fang Fang’s friend disappeared, and Fang Fang heard gossip about a
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer neighbor, a farmer who’d just been executed for strangling his wife and daughter to death, nearly four years prior. Then she saw an old school picture of Xiao Mei in the local newspaper…
By the time Fang Fang reached puberty, she’d blossomed into a beautiful young girl. It’d surprised everyone in the village, too, since neither her mother, nor grandmother, nor any other relatives had cover girl looks.
But Fang Fang was a beauty. Frequently she was compared to one of the Four Beauties of Ancient China, Xi Shi, a girl so beautiful that fish would sink in the water after being so overwhelmed by her beauty that they’d forget to swim.
Fang Fang’s beauty was also made starker due to the gender imbalance in her village. This was during China’s “One Child Policy” and no one in the village wanted their only child to be a girl. Some girl babies were having their necks snapped at birth, their tiny corpses thrown in the garbage. Eventually, in her village, boys came to outnumber girls by three to one.
By high school, virtually every boy in her village, her school, had fallen head over heels in love with her, and she’d soon found herself inundated with suitors.
One of her uncles had taken a shine to her too. That uncle was a short, skinny man in his early 30s, and he’d been fast rising through the ranks of the local chapter of the Communist Party.
One ugly, rainy afternoon, he’d come by the house, when she was doing housework and her grandparents were working the fields. What he did to her, she didn’t understand, though it’d hurt, tremendously, and in a way she’d never experienced.
Later that evening, when she told her grandmother, her grandmother flew into a rage, her cheeks flushing blood red, a venomous glare steeled in her gaze.
Her grandmother then pulled Fang Fang from bed, and the two stormed into the living room, sat before their family altar.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer In the bowl before the altar, her grandmother mixed water, a fragrant herb, and then reached a tissue into Fang Fang’s underwear, swiped between her legs, and dunked the tissue into the bowl.
Her grandmother rose, and Fang Fang instinctively joined, the two of them standing before the altar, the bowl and its contents before them. Then her grandmother cusped her hands, pressing the palms together in the position of a budding lotus, and held her hands high above her head, whispered a prayer.
A couple of days later, the uncle had been found dead, floating in a nearby lake.
He’d been riding his motorbike by the lake, when, according to police reports, he’d lost control of the vehicle, driven straight into the body of water and drowned.
However, a villager, riding a donkey, witnessed the incident, and rumors of his account swirled furiously through the village. The villager said a water ghost, a silhouette of swirling water, had appeared, manifested itself on the bike’s pillion.
Then the ghost had wrapped its watery arms around the uncle’s neck, and the two took a sharp turn, rode right into the lake.
Another week later, Fang Fang was visited by her uncle’s ghost. Right outside her bedroom window. The ghost walking up and down invisible stairs, in the night sky.
The ghost glowing under the moonlight, looking like a rotten fish… dripping wet, skin slipping off bone… The ghost shrieking and retching, pausing every step or two to vomit big blasts of filthy water.
The ghost swung his horrid face at her, shivering and shaking, a look of pain, guilt and fear in its wild, ghastly eyes. Emitting a wheeze, then a terrible cough, the spirit then faded into the night.
However, this time the ghost didn’t scare Fang Fang, and it wasn’t long before she was fast asleep.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer THE HAZE
It wasn’t since 2014 that Shanghai had seen such haze.
In recent years, Emperor Poo had enacted several measures to clean up the air.
Factories were held to higher emission standards. Illegal factories shuttered.
Vehicles, too, were held to stricter emission standards, and altogether, there’d been far more days with blue skies.
Until the winter of 2025.
No one knew why exactly. It’d been unexplainable. Just one day the skies turned thunderstorm gray, yet no rain came. And the skies remained overcast, which wasn’t unusual at that time of year. But then the haze came. And it came on strong.
It was originally thought to be fog, and it’d appeared to be fog. It was a thick mist that curdled in over the Bund, soon wrapping itself over Shanghai like a shroud.
The haze reaching out endlessly over swaths of city blocks, fogging in a milky white miasma that remained parked over whole neighborhoods, reduced visibility to mere meters.
Meteorologists were unable to identify the causes of the mist, the fog, the smog, the haze, or whatever it was. Originally, it was believed that it’d pass after a few days. Perhaps it was a weather pattern. That was at least the official line from the local weather bureau. But after a week, the haze remained idle over the entirety of the city.
And it wouldn’t budge. Normally such masses of air would pass. But not this one.
It remained and remained snarling traffic, cancelling flights, bringing bustling Shanghai to a standstill.
Locals began to grow restless. The public demanded answers. But none, at least from the government, were forthcoming. The haze started to then grow, coalesce, enveloping the city so thickly that the mere meters of visibility shrank to centimeters.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Vehicular traffic ground to a halt after a series of gruesome accidents. Rescue crews unable to retrieve bodies, wreckage, due to the haze. Flights, trains had to be suspended indefinitely, entire highways shut down.
Emperor Poo kept silent, but his deputies and orderlies attempted to assuage concerns, stating that it was a rare weather event. And this was originally bought by the populous. And the government had been successful in maintaining the food supply to the city. However, the people’s patience began to run thin, when, two weeks after the haze had started, the mysterious choking deaths began.
The deaths were reminiscent of the black plague. Random city dwellers started coughing up blood, asphyxiating on what appeared to be a mixture of bile and blood…
Bodies could be seen in the city streets. Dead bodies, with skin pale as frozen ice, lay in front of public buildings, or were slumped over, sprawled out on sidewalks, all in pools of bloody black puke. The expired urbanites’ faces stamped with startled, perplexed expressions…
Once the choking deaths began, the government cut off internet access to the city.
Then ceased broadcasting local or national news about the haze and about anything to do with Shanghai. The army was called in, in hazmat suits, to seal off the area.
But still, the haze remained parked over Shanghai. Didn’t move eastward, southward, northward, or westward. It remained trapped, affixed over the metropolis, as if kept in place by a roof of some sort.
However, as much as Emperor Poo’s government attempted to keep the extraordinary situation under wraps, there were those in Shanghai with satellite internet connections, those with software allowing them to bypass censorship controls, and news of the choking deaths, images of dead bodies piled in public streets, corpses curled and ghastly, bloody vomit dripping from their mouths…
these and other unsettling images circulated outside the Middle Kingdom, throughout the free world, via internet, social media and traditional international media outlets...
Blame for the haze, choking deaths was tossed around, like a political hot potato, and the usual finger-pointing and screaming matches ensued.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Several prominent voices in science, the media, and even celebrities weighed in, with various conflicting takes. Meanwhile, the city of Shanghai started sinking, its districts detaching, submerging lower, the land masses eventually breaking off and spilling, crumbling into the Bund and the East China sea.
And after a few more weeks the news cycle just moved on.
HOSTAGE SITUATION (RED RAIN 1)
The mirrored walls and ceiling went pink. And in the ceiling a high-definition image formed… It was Stephen Hawking, the scientist, at a strip club… A Lil Jon rap song blared as a young Black exotic dancer, in a thong, was twerking her sizable buttocks only inches from Doctor Hawking’s face…
Then the ceiling, then the room went dark.
It was as if the power had cut out, but the air conditioner droned on. The neon lights from the bar across the street still danced in my window, and I could hear stray cats screeching and yelping. I think one was in heat.
My phone buzzed. I reached for it but found myself stuck to the bed, as if my body were made of Velcro.
“It’s a hostage situation,” called out a computerized, Stephen Hawking-sounding voice from the city street, “he’s up there with a fucking machine gun.”
Then there were sirens and vehicles with loud revving engines. It was a calamitous commotion… a cacophony.
“Call it off. Call it off,” the computer voice commanded, and it sounded now like the voice was blasting from a speaker phone.
A spotlight shot into my room, tracked my pet scorpions. They were out of the dollhouse again and crawling around the foot of my bed. Then I saw Shitbear was jumping up and down on the bed, had my elderly woman sexdoll in a headlock.
Shitbear, in the space of three days, had already grown to the size of an Oompa
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Loompa and was wearing a RUN-DMC, all-black Adidas tracksuit and heavy gold chains... And a scary grin.
“In dark times, will the children sing?” Shitbear cried out. Then he stopped bed-jumping. Stood in place and snapped my sexdoll’s silicone neck. Then he tossed the floppy sexdoll to the floor.
“Yes, yes they will! The children will sing about the dark times!” Shitbear exclaimed.
Shitbear then raised his arms, outstretched them, knocked on Heaven’s Door, and with that, my pet scorpions came crawling over him. The scorpions multiplying into a festering swarm. Shitbear soon engulfed in the scorpions, wearing them in a live-action suit. Then Shitbear dove from my bed, as if at a rock concert, stagediving…
I found myself unattached, able to stagger up from the bed. I was naked and found my body covered in tattoos. Tattoos of numbers and equations.
The lights clicked back on and buzzed like a cloud of flies. And I saw that the silver walls of my room were melting into pink wainscoting that became strawberry milk. Then the hardwood floor slicked over in a slippery substance that smelled of coconuts. Perhaps it was coconut oil.
I slipped and slid, like a novice ice skater, to the window, to meet the commotion.
The scorpions paid me no mind, were too busy gnawing at the carcass of Shitbear.
Stepping over my busted elderly woman sexdoll, I opened the blackout curtains, scanned the shitty street and spotted an old bag lady naked and crucified to the front door of an abandoned McDonald’s.
Stepping away from the window, I flicked on my phone and was greeted with an ad for a work-from-home job. The ad featured a smiling young lady, in a hot pink bikini, working on her laptop while sitting alone on an empty white sand beach, crystal-clear water lapping at her bare feet.
The smiley girl in the WFH ad looked nothing like my sexdoll, the Stephen Hawking stripper, or the naked homeless lady crucified to the abandoned McDonald’s.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer JUST AS YOU FALL ASLEEP (RED RAIN 2)
The room was spinning. I’d had a few too many shots of whiskey and lay back into the king-sized bed in my hotel room. I’ve heard hotels called depressing and impersonal, especially generic, chain hotels like this one, but I must admit to finding a comfort in the anonymity, a soothing nature to the familiarity.
Anywhere I go in the world, the Marriott is the same…
I’d really had too many shots, I pondered, and the blackout curtains were open, the balcony’s glass doors drinking in neon lights. Ambient street sounds reverberating along the walls. Outside, at a bar across the busy street, a Filipino band was playing a tortured acoustic folk version of “Shape of You.”
Despite the hotel’s generic comfort, I could start to see mind rot, wolf eyes and a cosmic glare tangling in the half-mirror over the TV. The whiz of the AC was hypnotizing. Then the lingering scent of the room service tray wafted and tingled my nose. Spicy noodles…
This wasn’t my first rodeo. Sudden somnolence followed. A salesman’s smile and an invisible chloroform rag to the mouth. A push to the gate. And I alighted to an entrance…
Then I was on a busy city street. I was in a spacesuit, skateboarding by Madonna and a college-aged blond girl, a sorority type, and the two were doing vocal warmup exercises in front of an overturned Tesla. The overturned Tesla was on fire, in bright blue flames. Madonna had a pit bull on a leash and was naked, covered in peanut butter. The young girl was stripping naked and was putting on a nun’s outfit, started singing something about how she “wanted boobs like Katy Perry’s.”
Skating on, I ollied over a curb, stole onto a sidewalk and saw a subway stop filled with a clumped mass of headless businesspeople. The headless mass in pantsuits, smart casual, and tight-fitting three-piece suits. The headless mass a paralyzed
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer stampede, unable to step down the stairs leading to an underground subway station…
Suddenly I was in a red mist. A dragon drone lifted me into the air, via a hook and chain, like a live milk cow dangling from a crane.
With the dragon drone puffing, pushing me forth, I flapped my arms and watched from above like God. I witnessed schools of weathered, shirtless, mud-caked men, blunts dangling from their chapped lips. The men were growling. Carrying axes and shovels. The men were exiting a clown car and marching in a single-file line.
They were trudging toward a dumpster fire. The dumpster in the middle of an empty city street… The dumpster fire encircled by obese high school cheerleaders practicing Tai-Chi...
Shimmery white vapors of steam curled up from the dumpster’s conflagration as the dirty shirtless men brushed past the obese cheerleaders. The men, stepping forward, formed human pyramids and then bellyflopped, dove into the dumpster, disappeared into its flames.
The dragon drone honked, sputtered, lowered me like an anchor and dropped me onto a moving skateboard that was riding down the sidewalk on its own.
Just in time for the black flies…
Waves, funnels of black flies emerged from open sewers, poured out of skyscrapers’ windows and doorways. The flies on a kamikaze mission, flying straight into the dumpster fire, zapping into orange explosions, popping like popcorn…
A bare-chested, emaciated man cut a figure through the black mass of flies, stood alone on a street corner. The man had a head so big he looked alien. The man started thrumming his harp-like, skeletal ribs, sang “Like a Virgin.” As I skated past him, swatting away flies, with my hands, he handed me a phone, an early telephone, with a cup-receiver attached to a string. A phone from the 1940s.
“Ring ring!” he called out, and I noticed several gaps between his upper teeth.
Then his big head began to shrink, like a balloon slowly losing its air.
Reaching through a swarm of black flies to receive the phone, I heard a loud gong, and then another, and another, the gongs louder and louder until I was jolted
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer awake, and when I awoke, I lifted my head, widened my eyes and turned my gaze to see the hotel room’s landline ringing off the hook.
Wiping the sleep from the corners of my eyes, I struggled, swam through the bed and bellycrawled and dragged myself to the phone. I reached for, scooped up the receiver, which, in that moment, looked like a pair of stumpy legs on a stick. Then I pressed the cold cups to my right ear and cheek, heard a computerized, Stephen Hawking voice. The voice had a tunnel echo to it, as if sounding from a bullhorn:
“There’s been a shooting. Remain inside your room and bolt and lock your door.”
Before I could react, the line went dead. Then I rolled out of bed, looked out the window, saw the Filipino band, all four of them, gunned down, lying in puddles of blood. The one with the man-bun was still clutching his acoustic guitar, the guitar with a bullet hole in its pickguard…
Then my cell phone rang. The adrenaline had woken me up and I rushed over to my phone, picked it up, and clicked the green button to receive the call. The call was from an unknown number. And when it connected, I heard the same Stephen Hawking tunnel voice saying: “You’ve reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.”
BANGKOK SLEEP (RED RAIN 3)
Bangkok was in a slumber, a gloomy silence.
A trickle of sweat slid down my spine, and I panned my gaze out around the empty street, below my building, gave it a searching look.
Nothing. Only a scrawny gray stray cat creeping down the alley. Hopefully it’d catch some of the rats that’d been running around, though I wasn’t sure the stray cat, as skinny as it was, could take any, much less many, of those rats, in a fight.
The rats seemed to be growing larger, day by day. Must be the takeout food place, an Indian curry ghost kitchen, always chucking out its leftovers. That must be providing their sustenance.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I’d been standing on my balcony, watching the rats, having a break from reading.
It’d been my solace, my sanctuary, reading, sticking my nose into books.
Disappearing into authors’ worlds, studying fascinating subjects, a wonderful refuge from the apocalyptic scene the world had become.
However, despite reading several books, long-neglected classics included, the solitude was eating at me. The solitude, like a creature, inside me, shed its mass, was spreading over me…
It was in these days that I began seeing things, hearing voices. Before now, I’d never hallucinated. But now, hallucinations had become a daily occurrence.
At first, I’d been seeing floaters. Then the floaters transformed into larger shapes, distinct outlines, what initially began as possibly being animals grew into human forms. Something living in the corner of my eye… As if a person were there, in my apartment, with me.
Not only was I sensing the presence, but I was also feeling the presence. It felt like that noticeable, uncomfortable feeling of gaze detection, when you know a person is looking at you. And they are. You see them, their eyes fixed upon you.
That was the feeling I was having, being in my apartment, I was feeling as if I had someone staring at me. All the time.
It was especially strong, the feeling, in the shower.
Standing in the shower, water rushing over me, I’d sense, something, there. After washing my hair, one morning, I opened my eyes and was finally confronted by…
A man, with abnormally stumpy legs, arms that were long, hanging below his kneecaps. He was portly and short, bald, and appeared to be in his 50s or 60s. His skin smooth as porcelain. He wore a beer shirt and a kilt. Then he sneered, lifted his kilt, and a fierce, hissing nest of neon green snakes was nuzzling in and around his pelvis. Then he slowly disappeared into the steam of the running shower.
At first sight, I’d been mortified, but as he melted into the mist of the shower, a towering wave of relaxation, chillaxed me into an almost Zen, preternatural state…
The next morning, I awoke, slid my eyes open, and it felt to me as if my eyeholes were peepholes, two peepholes in a clandestine hotel, somewhere near a train
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer station. Somewhere where it’s still black and white and where people still use payphones.
But then I noticed I remained in Bangkok. And a blood sun had risen. A stray mosquito retreated to the base of my television, and I squinted at the slants of light trickling in from between the blinds, dust mites dancing in the air.
Then I saw that the man in the kilt had returned. But this time he was shirtless.
His stomach cut wide open, his entrails were spilling from his stomach, in a wet-hot, gooey, red and black mess.
The entrails shifted into snakes; the same bright green reptiles I’d seen before on his pelvis. The snakes slithering up quickly, from the floor, beginning to wrap themselves, coil around the kilt-wearing intruder, and within seconds, he’d again vanished into the air.
Once more, the Zen rush washed over me, and remained with me, even when I went out to the balcony and noticed that I was wearing a kilt.
ACCIDENT ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF SHANGHAI
It was a usually hectic day, on a heavily trafficked road, outskirts of Shanghai…
The sky was smog grey. The December air damp, 6 Celsius and bitter with diesel and PM2.
A fast-food deliveryman on an e-bike, coffin nail dangling from his mouth, was racing a yellow light and hooked a left at the front gate of an adjacent apartment compound.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer From his blind side, an 18-wheeler, burgundy semi-truck, hauling gravel…
The trucker, a buzzcut shushu, blasting love ballads, singing to distorted speakers…
… a sudden 90+ decibel horn…
The deliveryman met the semi’s grill and pancaked beneath rubber and steel.
The deliveryman's bones and bike pulverized; his body split in two; his torso, limbs, wholly severed; machinery and mangled orange jumpsuit, dark blood, innards, appendages carpeting the asphalt…
The truck driver bumping, thumping over the body, tried in vain to brake but skidded out, and struck a pedestrian, a schoolgirl, crushing her foot, before he twisted the steering wheel, jackknifed and collided into an apartment block’s withered facade.
Passersby froze and stared at the fallen young girl as she writhed, wept and wheezed, clutched what was left of her foot and screamed for her mother.
Passersby pointed phones and photos, panoramically live-streamed the scene, and texted texts.
The trucker, in shock, sat hugging the wheel, twitching, tears streaming down his red, cherubic cheeks... Lachrymose love ballads still playing… “我想你 “…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer A circle of onlookers formed around the girl. Another formed around the truck.
Locals looked over the idling vehicle while its driver remained still in the cab.
The girl’s red grandparents arrived. Her grandpa slapping on the hood of the semi, on the door, finally hurling a silver baijiu bottle that blistered into pieces, denting the windshield.
The police arrived. Cordoned off the area. Two ambulances and purple paramedics collecting body parts, carrying away the shrieking schoolgirl on a gurney.
Blue policemen restrained the girl’s relatives and were finally able to coax the trucker out...
Social media lit up with different factions assigning the blame to various parties.
Some censured the deliveryman for running a yellow light. Many faulted the trucker for driving too fast. A few placed the responsibility solely on the Japanese manufacturer of the truck.
The girl’s foot had to be amputated, and her family sued the trucking company.
The trucker sued the delivery company.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The delivery company blamed the deliveryman and refused to pay compensation to his family...
A couple weeks later, the deliveryman’s family held a protest at the intersection, hoisting enlarged shenfenzheng portrait photos of the young deliveryman, unfurling long red banners that blocked and snarled morning traffic.
They held hand-written signs, calligraphic claims the apartment complex had an unsafe parking lot and front gate area; demands for indemnification. A female monk in white robes burned sheets of paper, knelt and said prayers in the middle of the street.
The deliveryman’s mother shrieked and prostrated in the road and had to be carried away by policemen. The protesters were arrested and held in administrative detention for five days.
About a month after the protest, the municipality installed a flashing amber
“caution” road sign at the intersection.
Then the whole incident was scrubbed from social media and news outlets at the special request of a local land development company…