Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4567 | Page 8

As time dragged its feet, I was led to the streets by the screaming pain of my swimming mind and bubbling urge to throw up. I felt drunken drowsiness as it weighted down on my fighting eyelids, as I stumbled my way to some sort of dark alley, so I could quietly throw up without being noticed. But something in the air jerked me back to my senses. I stared into the consuming darkness around the corner, my muscles tensed and pupils dilated at the sight of the lifeless leather shoes of the white man I saw the night before, patches of red blooming on his suit. Several limbs that belonged to his male assistants, drooped lifelessly to the pit of death . Purple high heels, clicking their tongues; a trail of dark red kisses implanted on the ground .My own terrified face, compressed to those cleanly dull pupils, burn into sight. The accepting bareness of green, the blunt reflection of aching reality. The revealing translation of my own humble cowardice. I hate those eyes. _____________________________________________________________________________________ The sky’s a frothy gray, with its half-lidded eyes a drowsy blur, turbid from the desires unyielded. With damp expressions and dim-colored suits buttoned up to stiff collars and strangling ties, crowds of people swarm about like the raging waves of Yangtze River Delta. The overlapping scratching of leather shoes form a blur of shadows, giving out a curious sense of dullness. Like well polished machinery, stiff and lifeless. I quicken my pace, as well as my breath, as I walked nearer to Miss Zhou’s school. Today, I will ask her, Zhou Ning (周 寧) ’s, hand in marriage. My fluttering heartbeat froze to a stop. I recognized them, those revealing green eyes that will strip me down to my original skin of filth and depth of materialistic desires. Wearing ragged clothes in loose ripples of wrinkles, she now beheld a handsome binary between man and woman. Her hair was cut to shoulder-length, messily tangled, like a wild nest unkempt. They fall in dark curls on her sharply engraved features, with a boyish cap clinging loosely to them. But this time,her eyes loosened their film of hardness, softening into a lovingly tender gaze as they fixed intense on Zhou Ning’s brown ones, who was patiently teaching her how to read and write. They muttered about something, activating my memory of blissful summer hums of buzzing bees and laughed together. My eyes widen as a thought of uneasiness quivered inside me. I spat curses under the edges of my gritted teeth. Those haunting eyes of green, to my horror, were reflecting the same love and longing of mine, to my Zhou Ning. ______________________________________________________________________________________ I hired a man named Mr Zhang, an infamous chinese cartoonist and concurrent detective who always criticized the racial mistreatment of the chinese in Shanghai, with a certain lasting interest in that green-eyed wretch. After an rewarding offer of jingling coins, I was given the background details of the women of hellish green eyes and spied on her whenever she was near my flower, Zhou Ning. That horrid woman, who was introduced as Skak that night, was named Suozana Lavon. The parents of her mother are mixed hybrids of foreign and chinese while her father is an unlicensed Russian refugee. She learnt fighting skills from street fighting experiences, domestic violence, and from a Russian refugee as her teacher (who was once a retired soldier, now having a homosexual affair with a Japanese officer, Hakanama Takgasho ). She had worked before as a bar dancer/singer, prostitute, newspaper kid, thief, gang fighter and now trying to apply to be a driver, or any job with a stable income.