As Night Turns into Day, Ashes Turn to Dust

The frosty corridors of Shanghai held many victims in their warm apartment pods, where penniless citizens leaned on their heaters, often only a series of candles that ran off of the oils of the dead animals that lay heavy over their shivering shoulders. In the middle of the night, only a few lights could be seen in the city, as the rickshaws and bicyclists had fled the streets for the warm confines of their domiciles, but one lone candle flickered toward the bottom of a basement window next to Chan’s open-air market. It was Marzine’s apartment, which at the moment lay host not only to an unexpected guest, but also to a clamoring alarm clock.

As the alarm clock hammered its way into the pair’s brain, she awoke and was surprised at her discovery of a male torso next to hers. As she silenced the clock, she looked into his thick closed brown eyes, and smiled while she caressed the long main of hair that lay comfortably on the twists and crevices of the comforter.

It had all happened in a blur aided by bootlegged liquor and several hits off of the opium pipe, that lay undispensed on the floor, next to the silkscreen print caked in red.

Only broad red strokes of memory came to her now, another one night stand with a faceless gent who temporarily filled her head and bed with passion, only to be left as immobile as the corpse that he is, snoring and void of any of the passionate insights from the night before.

But his eyes came to life, and she pretended that she never second guessed his motives, backed her rear end to his torso, and pulled the blankets and sheets over them, smiling and looking demurely into the stranger’s eyes (She remembered his name was Robert, but that was it, something lingered on the surface. Shed seen him before, perhaps only in a nightmare, or an opium daze.)

But at this moment they lie in each other’s arms, as she reached out while his eyes stumbled open, catching the yearning in her eyes, as they pulled back the sheets, and slid into a coital pose, where Marzine straddled him, making love as the first morning’s rays peeked into her basement, the shipping trucks roared by, as she flailed on top of him, enjoying her orgasm as she dismounted, reached to the bedside table, unlatching the drawer, grabbing the knife and slitting Robert’s throat until his gasps filled, then left the room abruptly as she stared down at his FBI badge that lay behind the flung clothing that inhabited a dark space in the corner.

She’d have to disappear for a while, again. The dossier that she would uncover during the next few days made that inexplicitly clear. This one was for Ed, and as the post coital bliss faded into a powerful cavity in the lower recesses of her heart, the place that still believed in the sanctity of marriage, the fidelity of fatherhood and the goodliness found in politicians.