THE SENSITIVITY READER CUTS HIS OWN PENIS
The Sensitivity Reader ran his bony fingers through his salt-and-pepper mohawk. He’d been under duress these past days. Locked down inside his 30 SQM apartment, staring only at whitewashed walls.
The Reader’s eyes were dry and blood red and felt as if they’d been filled with sand. His body felt like a block of wood… A peaty taste of whiskey burbling up in his burps…
“I was the best sensitivity reader in the business! I fucking read for AGENTED, PUBLISHED authors like Adele Holmes! ADELE. FUCKING. HOLMES!!!!!!!!”
The Sensitivity Reader’s was a case study in isolation. But his vow of silence had been dwindling, devolving into a diatribe far worse than Dave Chappelle’s 8:46.
And it was getting worse than a Michael Richards’ set of stand-up comedy.
Here and there, The Reader’s internal dialog, his solitude, his accumulation of time and flesh would be interrupted by ghosts. Unfriendly ghosts of companions long gone… Demons…
Like his ex-wife. The woman of exotic darkness. The woman damasked with dismay. The waif who’d been popping in, here and there, walking through walls. The waif with sullen cheeks, bony arches under her eyes… The waif reeking of shit. Her visits as welcome as an unflushed toilet.
The Sensitivity Reader had known feathery lightness in her hair. Her heavenly scents… Her silky skin soft as a flower soaked by rain.
But these days the waif just stank of shit. And looked like shit too. The waif in her striped pajamas. The waif emaciated, rail-thin, looking as if she’d escaped from a concentration camp in Xinjiang. Her crown of shiny hair just a slim wave. She’d once been so winsome… The waif with perfect facial structure, a doll’s face. A face worthy of being painted.
At times, the waif had been fogging in, appearing in oil-painting poses… The waif stretching for badminton… The waif supine. Air drumming with chopsticks. Her waist-length hair spilling over the edge of the bed like a tomato-red waterfall. The waif levitating, suspended in air, stuck like a light to the ceiling.
“It was her!” The Reader would strain, neck veins popping out, shouting at no one. “IT WAS HER!!!”
To him, her skeletal face was as distinct as a dead president on a blood-stained banknote… The waif’s snickering. Her summoning swarms of hornets…
“She was fucking here, man, she was fucking here!!!” The Sensitivity Reader would argue with the wall, wash the demon away with whiskey and gales of hysterical laughter. But even the wall knew the waif lived in the air…
The Sensitivity Reader slept with a sledgehammer next to his bed. He’d go down swinging if his ex-wife, nude but for her pink Von Dutch mesh hat, ever exploded out of the closet again, attacked him with garden shears. If she ever again insulted his pasta sauce, attempted to amputate his penis.
Or if she ever again handcuffed him to the bed, blasted “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” or the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication on repeat. The waif leaving him in agony as she hooted and hollered, in the next room, at trashy reality TV. The waif, off her meds again, watching reruns of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie making fun of poor people.
The Reader was ready, too, if that cockroach the size of a crocodile ever came back… Oh yes, The Sensitivity Reader knew all about psychic pain, picky eaters, earworms, infestations and sharp objects…
But The Sensitivity Reader had only seen the waif once in the last few days. It was in the shower. She’d slid in through the steam with a straight razor blade, was smiling with black gaps in between her teeth while carving five stars into her shaven pussy mound. Bloody red rivulets running down her chicken legs… The shower water suddenly smelling of unwashed ass…
“Psychic spies from China!!!!” The Sensitivity Reader cursed at the rain shower as light red water, the color of a wine cooler, circled his feet and the clean scent of soap returned.
Dead! She was dead. Dead! The Reader struggled to remind the deepest recesses of his being. After all, she should be vaporous.
After the divorce, she’d been in a gruesome, spectacular accident. In a subway car, in Beijing, that’d flooded with sewage… He’d imagined his rage had festered into blood magic. That she’d died a horrid death on his account. The waif swallowing columns, choking on mouthfuls of brown wastewater. The bitch literally eating shit and dying, just as he’d often commanded…
“Fucking worse than Pablo Escobar blowing up a passenger plane just to kill one person… FUCKING WORSE THAN EVERY SONG ON CALIFORNICATION!!!!!”
But no. She wasn’t really dead. Because he’d see her in the air. And in dreams. Her twisted smile spackled in shit, her whipcord coil stinking putridly, and he’d remember the times she’d teased him, saying he should see a psychiatrist for his increasingly frequent, chicken suit-clad visits to gay bars and glory holes.
The Sensitivity Reader stuck his fingers down his throat but didn’t find anything. Then his face went crimson. Then he headbutted the wall, screamed an unintelligible sound, sat cross-legged on the tiled floor, rocked back and forth in a fit of sorrow, then finally flicked on his phone.
In his hands he witnessed the carnage. Live video. Grainy, flickering, unsteady video. The riots. The angry mobs. It was France. But it was now.
As he rubbed more sand from his eyes, he knew what it was: The hated Emperor Xi Jinping’s Last Stand.
Emperor Xi’s palace gates were being stormed. The masses braving gunfire. Masses swimming, sailing across the moat. Rioters in makeshift armor, storming inside, firing 3D-printed guns, flinging beer bottle petrol bombs. The palace grounds becoming a smoldering volcano of fire and smoke.
Human waves washed in like tsunamis slapping shores. The masses chanting, cheering, waving red flags and singing the national anthem. The masses locking arms, in a flood of screaming humanity. An aggrieved wave of arms and legs, full-throated and pushing forward.
And they kept coming, the protestors, the muckers, the rioters. In an endless stream. The flailing masses, in lockstep, surging in an unstoppable current.
The palace guards were eventually overwhelmed. Many of the guards, in their feathery hats, were trampled under the angry feet of the rioters, and scores threw down their epaulets and guns and tore off running, their faces contorted in terror.
The mobs eventually breached the gates, swarmed into the palace.
It wasn’t long before the masses were dragging out the Emperor, the Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike. Emperor Xi was dead they proclaimed. His previously pristine, fleshy face bruised and bloodied. His nude, bloated gray body dragged out by a ski-masked covey. Emperor Xi’s corpse leaving a splotchy stripe of blood.
The ski-masks brought Emperor Xi’s corpse before the cameras. Lifted his floppy head. Then a member of the retinue produced a machete, pressed the serrated silver blade to Emperor Xi’s throat, drawing an immediate line of blood. And once the ski-masked man started sawing, he appeared like a cellist gone mad.
As the impromptu surgery began, blood began spurting from Emperor Xi’s flabby neck like two fountains, and Emperor Xi’s limp body bounced back to life. The Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike, Xi Jinping flopping like a fish, his swollen eyes sliding open in shock. And Emperor Xi attempted to wriggle and he gurgled, spit globs of blood, then unloosed a raspy, pathetic plea for his life that went unanswered as the mob secured his person and commenced the decapitation.
The Sensitivity Reader closed his phone. Stood up and stretched his legs. He couldn’t witness any more. Nothing, not even booze, could erase what he’d seen. He’d sneak outside, for a walk, but the Little Pinks were babooning in packs. The Little Pinks out for blood, saliva, butts and body parts. Plus it was over 40 degrees Celsius. Even at night these days it wasn’t too pleasant to be outside.
His window was lightly caked with sand. But through a beige film The Reader could see there was a prehistoric, crocodile-sized cockroach on his balcony. The prehistoric cockroach was perched on its haunches and rose so it walked on its hind legs. The creature then turned toward the window, started singing an out-of-tune, falsetto version of “Scar Tissue.” And The Reader noticed the cockroach had the face of his ex-wife… as well as her shit-eating grin…
