From The Filth #7, April 2012. This story is inspired by true events
-
Crushworld
人肉搜索
(‘Renrou sousuo’ – Human Flesh Hunt)
by Giacomo Lee
-
A burst of Taiwanese soft rock accompanies the black screen reading Sindy, before changing to Crush, the title of the track. Then the screen fades with the song to show a late twenty-something girl stroking a kitten, walking along an esplanade in high heels, black skirt and leopard dress. Head bowed, ‘Sindy’ can’t look at the hand-held camera following her steps, the river breeze unsettling her short hair. The creature is ginger and fits snugly between Sindy’s hands, rubbing its burr against her lips. Girl then lays the kitten down on its back, almost as big as the hexagonal slab she’s chosen to lay it upon. The cat paws the air before Sindy crushes the creature’s skull with one black heel, straight through one of its eyes -
From Every Reason #9, March 2012. Annotations here
Second Night
Petrol station’s had it. The flames are jumping from the store bit to the pump part. We’re fucking howling, our feet never touching the ground for more than seconds at a time.
From Swallow It Whole, March 2012. Annotations here
A bee as bulbous as the sun as bulbous as the gas tank it whizzes around, its company mascot an emoticon smiling down upon Yu Honda’s field, the colours of which it loses itself in through one fell swoop. Buzz zurr…
There walks Yu Honda, arm-in-arm with Yoko, cowed like her by the sun and general wear & tear as they cross through the apiary to a small cabin. This outpost of theirs is a little shack by the field’s white wooden perimeter, small and unassuming unlike the chunky metal and wire surrounding the pea-green gas sphere.
Yu presses upon a few of the knocked out posts which show where the break-ins occurred, Yoko unlocking the door to the cabin. Inside is nothing but a little light and two blue sleeping bags flat upon the floor, along with two small oak chairs, which Yu carries outside and places by the door.
The two take their places and take the other’s hand, looking out onto the field. It’s just them and the tank and the world, and me, the Bee Who Saw It All. Buzz zurr.
An elegiacomo exclusive, xoxo is a short sequel of sorts to my novel Red Trick, a book I wrote in 2007 that finally found publication February 2012. Consider it a catch-up session with the book’s main character MC Red Trick (aka Freddy) at the age of 26.
xoxo (seven years later)
Buster Keaton is blacked up in paint, on the run from the long truncheon of the law. He ducks round a corner, losing the fat flatfoot who then bumps into a black handyman walking down the street. Freddy can already feel the two guys from work shift uncomfortably on the bunk bed apparatus they’re sharing, so decides to laugh so everyone can feel fine, where really he would have smiled and shaken his head. He looks up at the busy glass floor above, and almost gets an upskirt view right above where he’s sitting.
From the Midnight Train anthology, February 2012. Annotations here
The dream would follow the same pattern all summer. I’d be seated on the train to work, riding the westbound route of the Northern Line. It was my normal morning trip, though the carriage seemed a little emptier than normal, and the scarf wrapped up over my chin meant it must have been winter above ground. In my stare: my foot, shaking, with both of my legs crossed as inconsiderately as usual. On my right: a man holding the Metro, but I could only see the front page, a blind spot for the brain, with its photograph and headline as indistinct as the reader’s face.
Giacomo Lee is a writer for YAM Magazine. His debut novel Red Trick was published earlier this year, and various short stories by the author can be found @ Elegiacomo
-
Sunny Side Up, Moody Side Down: A Review of Bleak Night (파수꾼, 2011)
by Giacomo Lee for the 2012 Korean Cinema Blogathon
-
Is the Asian classroom a mere hotbed of violence and intimidation? Are young people the big bad wolves of Asia? There seems to be no other conclusions when watching recent East Asian cinema. Look at 2009’s Love Exposure and Mother, or more recent fare like Confessions and Villain – all these productions from Japan and Korea centre around nefarious youths with enough time on their hands for murder and disturbingly anti-social behaviour. Villain, for example, veered between two kinds of repugnant youth, with one a socially stunted killer and the other a cocky playboy not averse to laughing up a girl’s death in public. In its chase for drama Villain lost a little realism though for the sake of sensationalism, and the same can be said for some of the other films listed above. While testing credibility can work in a violent gangster or procedural flick, or perhaps in something rather OTT like Battle Royale or Love Exposure, it doesn’t work so well on the more close-to-home level these films are aiming for.
In eight days the family would have been part of the procession, a throng thousands strong out in force for one man, dark and wooden, on a cross floated aloft. But tonight they pose for a photograph, out in the dark for another date as old as the stars.
The last thing I see isn’t my family,
nor the gunman aiming at me as we all go up in a second of flash,
but the statue of our Lord and Saviour, black as death, looking down upon me as I fall upon my back in seconds’ worth of light and death,
pulled down to the ground where I’ll stay, never to get up again…
They won’t carry him on their many shoulders, mourning his death; he’s just one man, now finally gravity’s fool.
From Leaf Garden #12*. Annotations here
Registration for conscription in South Korea is automatic for men in the year they turn 18. Military service lasts two years.
One young man held down another. David Kang-Ho couldn’t imagine what was running through the patient’s head, a fellow soldier, his curse words streaked by tears of bile from somewhere above the voice box, a rattle tinged with the aftertaste of blinding alcohol, a sermon told in tongues, ripping up one side of the jaw to show tendrils and teeth never seen. A little peek in his head would have shown a similar sound but dragged out, that of chirping cicadas nesting up a mountain in the summer, and nothing else, and no-one else, just views and plant life a little rustled by wind, and rocks in the water, ‘til a purple night-time fell and tigers with glowing eyes of orange prowled the plains looking for home.
From The Filth #5, January 2012. Annotations here
I: Litzy Moo
‘American police found family photographs in the gunman’s wallet and previous residence with all of his relatives’ eyes and teeth pricked out one by one with the use of a small pin.’
I want to sit in my room and think of the girl’s photo on the TV, smiling at me but I pushed the button off cos mama asked us.
In my first nightmare I can see the murderer man just sitting in a car and playing with his photo, and he’s got the pin and just sticking it in all the eyes in this old photo he got in a wallet, but he doesn’t hurt his baby eyes in the photo. And I tell the died girl to keep hiding cos I can see him coming with his gun. Me and her are hiding under a lady’s skirt in the queue and I can see the devil’s shoes coming to everyone very fast and hard and invisible. The skirt is yellow and hot like sunshine. I am being Luna and I wake up.
