Fukushima mon amour

By B.

I got back from work today to find 5 big white bags of salt piled up outside my door. I know she means well, and I can tell by the tiny little dark spots on the top bag that she must have cried a little before leaving. I cry too when I have good intentions and no means whatsoever left to communicate them, no way to mend. I can understand that. Tiny little spots on white bags of salt, covering half my door, like WW1 trenches. I set my laptop bag down on the floor, sit down with my back against it, and let the lights in the hallway go out. Still I sit, as to not disrupt the darkness.

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The Art of the Straight Line

by Estel Vilar Bofill

Lilo is a roundish soft mass of mildly chewed bubble gum. She is limbless but manages to move by constantly reshaping her body. Sometimes she resembles a worm, sometimes a bouncy rubber ball, sometimes an amoeba. Buñ’s blue mouth is all he is: a concave being. He engulfs objects and emanates sounds. That’s all he does. And then there is the rat-faced Curcus. He is the most monstrous one. He is so hairy that he has trouble moving his legs, all entangled in the dreadlocks of hair. How is that the three of them are either limbless or have disabled limbs? That’s what I asked myself the day I managed to escape the Salt Desert, and could allow my brain to produce thoughts again, after a long period of absolute focus on my motor functions.

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What Happens in Zhongshan Does Not Stay In Zhongshan

by Renée Reynolds

Fact number two: in the rush to catch the plane to Zhongshan that would connect to the family shuttle and deliver us to Xiaolan town just in time for Wei Wei’s cousin’s wedding, I failed to put the single most important object in my bag. Now don’t laugh. My GBS, my Gan Bei Sucker.

It’s a hybrid of two machines: the spit sucker at the dentist, and the catheter system that truckers and pilots use to empty their bladders. A tiny clear tube with adjustable valves irrigates from the edge of my shirtsleeve, hooking onto the lip of a glass instead a mouth, running up my arm, down my torso and leg, and into the medical-grade baggy, securely strapped over a trouser sock. I shave the tape spots or it pulls the hair. The manual pump is a small ball made of soft plastic that can be worn behind the knee (if seated) or in the armpit (if standing).

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Dead Guy Shanghai or My Name is Daniel Olzewski

by Danielle LeClerc

“Zapata’s?  Oh fuck no.”  Paul spat through the meat smoke onto pavement.  He took a long slug from a large Tsingtao and used his hand as a napkin, which was okay by me.

“Yeah.  Those bitches can forget it.”  Xiao Dan leaned back on wide shoulders.  He lifted his chin like he was somebody and chewed a hunk of lamb off one of his skewers.  Fat gelled in his teeth.  The little plastic stool and China in general, made him look huge.  Bigger than life.

“No way I’m putting up with the faggy fuckin’ Eurotrash that hangs out at that place.  I’d like to smash one of those French fuckers right in the head.”

(Our Mom’s French, asshole.)

Paul and Clay haw-hawed and tore at their meat sticks.

“One French fucker’s not enough, I’d like to take my fist and..”

And on it went ’til the Xinjiang BBQ stand shut down, at three am and behind a garrison of empty beers.  That was the night I first knew I had lost, and Xiao Dan had won.

My name is Daniel Olzewski.
I am 34 years old.
I was born in Lethbridge, Canada.

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The Shanghai Metro

by Dan Plunkett

I hate to admit, lest my inner nerd leave the dungeons and dragons game that occasionally occupies too much of my brain, that I have a weakness for Internet memes. For reasons beyond my comprehension, LOLCats are particularly funny to me. Maybe I like them because of the two retarded cats that I have back in Houston. I could create a whole website based on their obese hijinx alone. Maybe it was just because all the LOLCats are so adorable. There is, however, one LOLCat that came to mind the minute I stepped foot on the Line 2 train that day. A black cat, his wide green eyes completely open, staring off to the right side of the screen in a horrified manner, while the caption below read: what has been seen cannot be unseen.

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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…

Subways

by Tom Mangione

1

I am consumed by subways.
I say I only ride them.
They take me where I go.

But late at night it is more
It’s more than that for sure

I stay up late at night
Knowing I take the subways
And the subways take me.

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Accompaniment

by Joshua Tintner

I remember building spaceships, guns, and cars as a child.  Chunky things, they all ended up resembling 1980s-era Volvos—but then you can’t expect Frank Gehry curves when you give a kid Legos.  Maybe that’s why I never made Lego buildings.  Erecting a building with Legos isn’t creating, it’s stacking. Turning boxes into bigger boxes.

Bat an eye, blink away 20-odd years, and I now live in one of those boxes-made-of-boxes.  I’m walking into one of these sad behemoths, shuffling past the teenage security guard who thinks he’s a soldier.  Above me, rows of windows rise like stale layer cakes into Shanghai’s “foggy” skies.

My girlfriend and I scamper into Building-12, one of its cavities being our current apartment.  Good timing, as we are only slightly damp from the famous Shanghai Autumn drizzle.  We’re both tired from the office, but I still notice a naughty smirk rising on my girlfriend’s glossy lips.

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I Heart KTV

by Sam Gaskin

Four out of five people become total dicks when they enter a KTV room. They queue up long lists of songs that no one else knows and sing in languages that no one else can understand. They skip over their best friends’ tracks and hide microphones in their handbags. Later, drinks are thrown, punches are caught, and less resilient friendships are dropped.

As loathsome as it is, when the people you’re with are wasted, it’s inevitable that someone will get all worked up about singing played out songs that are themselves drunk on reverb. Once the idea has been seeded, you have no choice but to run with it to avoid the Inception army of angry coercions to join.

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Hard Seat from Shenzhen to Shenyang

by Alice Giusto

Xiao Jiu is a nice man. Every morning he wears those funny dark blue ear covers that make him look like a pixie. And then he smiles to people. Oh my God, he has such an infectious, overwhelming smile. It seeps deep into your bones and you cannot forget his smile. It gives you that kind of energy that starts your day on the right foot, your hard working day in Shenzhen at 7.30 a.m.

I know this because I am part of him. We are close to each other. We never separate. Or this is what I once thought.

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