Rabbit Hole

by Katrina Hamlin

Once upon a time someone had told her not to go out into the dark, dark city when the sun went down. Shanghai was full of monsters after midnight, she was warned.

She was told not to go out into the dark, dark city. But she went out.

She left a trail of rice behind her, so she could find her way back.

She followed the music in the air, towards the bright, distant lights.

She found a city built from the Frankenstein shards and splinters of other places and peoples. She couldn’t understand what she heard and saw, because they didn’t make sense, together or apart; red rabbits and Father Christmas and pink tinsel and gold characters and toneless speech and sing-a-long, ghostly laowai and rosy cheeked Shanghairen slamming glasses on the table, dancing on the bar, sleeping on the floor, falling out the door and blowing smoke into the night.

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Stained

Sketchbook

by Lindsay Redifer

illustrated by Robin Wang

Bang!

The metro doors bulge for a second and the train seems to go faster. It’s as if someone trapped in the tunnel has made a desperate attempt to get through the doors shoulders first. The sound is angry. I’ve only slept a few hours, I remind myself. I could be hallucinating.

Deep breath.

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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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Greetings from a former tenant

Photo by www.danielmaroti.com

by James Weir

Dear M.,

Salutations from the other side of the world. Seven thousand miles later and it feels like my head has been put into a vice and shaken like a can of paint. The scenery has changed, the air here is thick with pollution and the noise of the busy streets is loud, even twelve floors closer to this grey, Chinese sky.

It’s only been three days, but America feels far, far away, and though I don’t mean to say that I wish I was back, that I wish things were different, I do feel strange here. It is hard to sleep, though I imagine that will pass. My days end early and in a cloudy fog of jet lag and alcohol. I fall asleep soundly and quickly only to wake at strange times of the night, or early in the morning, half a day ahead of everyone I’ve known.

I toss, I turn. I fall back asleep, fitfully, and I wake the same. I look out the window at the lights from the buildings, at the cars passing slowly. Taxi’s, mostly. When the sun rises around six I watch it come quickly. Then I sleep again. I close my eyes and pretend that it is nighttime. In these glimpses of sleep I have vivid dreams, the kind that come quickly and linger for awhile, in those sandy eyed moments where everything is warm and new, when the day hasn’t begun and yesterday isn’t quite finished.

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H.A.L. Vicious Flash Fiction Charms Southern Belle

Sipping proper bourbon, H.A.L. courted the crowd at Southern Belle with some good ‘ole down home vicious flash fiction.  Eight great writers rose again to face off in 1,000 words or less.  SLAMHAI Round II victor / H.A.L. librarian Susie Gordon kept those saucy writers in check (we already did Shanghai Erotic Fiction Night, after all), but you can’t keep a naughty writer down as newcomer Lindsay Redifer proved with her kinky stories that won her the night.

Join H.A.L. again with Shanghai weapon of freestyle destruction Icenine as we present a night of lyrical freestyle frenzy in the third and final installment of Shanghai BARd Fight: the Rap Battle.  Thursday, March 31.  8pm, Lune.

More photos after the jump…

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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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H.A.L. Slams more than Tequila at Crocus

The crowd packed tight into Crocus, tables and chairs spread out in the bar around a small red stage.  The usual murmur of the crowd, the clinking of glasses broke suddenly with the bellowing of MC W.M. Butler reigning in the night.  Five H.A.L. poets and five brave souls plucked from the audience took the stage to face off in poetic combat.  From the start of the night, all pieces were composed on the spot, from round one all the way to the final lighting round where the final three poets had three minutes to complete their poems.  The final went to HAL newcomer Dan Plunkett, who rolled on stage with the calm of a monk and dropped his rhymes like fists from a Kung Fu master.

Join HAL again this Thursday at Southern Belle for Vicious Flash Fiction, with SLAMHAI, Round II winner Ms. Susie Gordon overseeing the mayhem as eight Shanghai based writers face off with short stories of less than 1,000 words.

More pictures after the jump….

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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…