Litro 160 Teaser

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ISSUE 160

Changes Taylor García Nancy Ludmerer Kathy Stevens Jenny Bhatt Eden Summerlee Emily Wildash Lindsay Hicks Prabda Yoon

Cover art | Dax Ward

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ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

editorial staff

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table of contents #160 Changes / 2017 March

05

Contributors

07

Editor's letter

fiction

10

Wheel of Fortune by Taylor GarcĂ­a

14

A Bohemian Memoir by Nancy Ludmerer

19

Olives by Kathy Stevens

24

The Prize by Jenny Bhatt

32

ootd by Eden Summerlee

41

The Disappearance of a She-Vampire in Pattaya

by Prabda Yoon

non-fiction

34

Growing Younger by Emily Wildash

37

Remembrance by Lindsay Hicks

photography

44

Dax Ward

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5 CONTRIBUTORS

Taylor García’s short stories and

essays have appeared in Chagrin River Review, Driftwood Press, Fifth Wednesday Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Writing Disorder, 3AM Magazine, Evening Street Review and others. He also writes the weekly column, “Father Time” at the GoodMenProject. com. He lives in Southern California with his wife and sons.

Nancy Ludmerer’s fiction appears

in The Kenyon Review, Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, Fish Anthology, North American Review, Sou’wester, New Orleans Review, and Masters Review’s “New Voices” series. Her essay “Kritios Boy” (Literal Latte) was named a notable essay in Best American Essays 2014 and her flash fiction “First Night” (River Styx) is reprinted in Best Small Fictions 2016. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She practices law and lives in New York City with her husband Malcolm and cat Sandy, a rescue from Superstorm Sandy.

Jenny Bhatt’s Pushcart-nominat-

ed writing has appeared or is upcoming in, among others: Amazon’s Day One literary journal, Gravel Magazine, Lunch Ticket, Eleven Eleven Journal, The Indian Quarterly, York Literary Review, NonBinary Review, Femina India, The Ladies Finger, LitBreak, and an anthology, Sulekha Select: The Indian Experience in a Connected World.

Having lived and worked her way around India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the US, she now splits her time between Atlanta, Georgia, USA and Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. She is currently working on her first short story collection.

Find her at: http://indiatopia.com.

Lindsay Hicks is finishing her last academic year in the Professional and Creative Writing program at Central Washington University located in Ellensburg, Washington. Her current project includes the creation of the website LindsayRay.com, where a collection of her writing will be featured. One of her creative outlets involves the art of makeup, as she pursues the fulfilment of encouraging women through her writing to embrace their inner beauty as well as maintaining an appearance they can be proud of. Her other hobbies include reading and writing poetry and creative nonfiction pieces, playing with her Chihuahua Theodore, and eating her weight in Hawaiian pizza.

6 Kathy Stevens is twenty-five and

currently attends the University of East Anglia where she's studying for an MA in Creative Writing and is the recipient of the UEA Kowitz Scholarship.

Her short stories have, most recently, appeared in The Literateur, Firefly, The Cadaverine, Supernatural Tales and the Bath Short Story and Bath Flash Fiction anthologies. She's working on her first novel, a coming of age story set in 1963.

Eden Summerlee lived in Scotland

until the age of six, before moving with her parents Salou, Spain, where she has lived ever since. She has a degree in History of Art and currently works as an English teacher in Tarragona.

Emily Wildash is a London-based

writer who has been published in the Guardian, Vagenda Magazine and the F Word. She is currently working on her first novel and can be found on twitter at @wildashwrites.

Prabda Yoon is the author of The Sad

Part Was. The author of multiple story collections, novels and screenplays, Prabda Yoon is also a translator (of classics

by Salinger and Nabokov), independent publisher (of books both originally written in and translated into Thai), graphic designer, and filmmaker. Having lived in the USA from the ages of 14 to 26, he speaks fluent English and is at home moving between the cultures.

Originally from the US, Dax Ward has been living, working and traveling in Asia since 2003, where he’s a Technology teacher by trade. Since 2007, he’s lived in the culturally vibrant and beautifully chaotic city that is Bangkok, Thailand where, at any given moment, Dax can find something remarkable to capture.

7

Editor's letter Dear Reader, Leo Tolstoy said, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

We have a resistance to change, whether it’s beneficial or not – we are programmed to resist change. People fear the unknown and would rather stick to the status quo, even if it’s harmful. The suffering may provide a meaning or purpose for one’s life.

As George Bernard Shaw said, “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Staying the same is a comfortable choice, even when change is necessary. As a result we become comfortable in our misery. Many have attributed the current political shift to the right and the embrace in many countries of nationalism as a resistance to globalization and the changes that come with it. Rather than lowering

borders and embracing the changes required, the western world is currently shifting back to the dark old days of fear and nationalism.

What with Brexit, the rise of Trump and the alt-right (where “alt” is code for neo and “right” for Nazi), etc., it doesn’t look a whole lot like things will be changing for the better any time soon. We all too often fear change which – along with nationalism, sheer racism, whatever – driving a lot of anti-immigration feeling.

Perhaps change for the better will come once we accept these changes, process them. Then as a society we will be better focused to fight it?

This month’s collection of stories are not explicitly political – though there is a distant glimpse of the States’ current presidential plight in Taylor García’s “Wheel of

8 @LitroMagazine @LitroMagazine

Fortune”. Change is what fiction – usually, traditionally – deals in: personal, psychological change – a fictional character is meant to come out of the other end of a story slightly different from what he or she was at the start, through some modest epiphany or moment of truth, some kind of emotional arc.

Change is also tied to time – you can’t really have one without the other – and the biggest change, of course, coming to each of us far sooner than we’d like – final, total, the end of our personal time – is death. We could easily have made this an issue themed entirely on Death. Kathy Stevens’s “Olives” deals with loss, and Nancy Ludmerer’s “A Bohemian Memoir” offers a unique perspective on the changes that time can bring. Both time and death figure in Eden Summerlee’s strange sort of science-fiction

fable, “ootd” – set in the distant but maybe not-distant-enough-for-comfort future, when everything’s changed, while still re ecting our own changeable reality.

We close the issue with a photo story from Thailand-based photographer Dax Ward whose images capture beauty where only ugliness remains.

Our team player this month is Elina Nikkinen!

Every- thing that is will change, and the changed will change further. Hence, one must neither get at- attached to joy, because that will pass away; nor get depressed with sorrow, because that too will pass away. Nothing is really permanent in this world. - Buddha.

Eric Akoto

Editor-in-Chief

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FICTION

Wheel of Fortune

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Taylor García Is history destiny that a fortune-teller can predict, or is it the spin of a gameshow’s wheel?

Santa Fé, New Mexico – June 1995 At the kitchen table, the First Lady leans forward to listen to Sister Rosa. The Sister, in tight jeans and house slippers and a faded black Guns N’ Roses t-shirt, dark hair up in a large high bun, appears as though she might have just gotten off work, and not from the convent. More like where the First Lady had dinner tonight. Sister Rosa murmurs in Spanish, maybe a prayer. Sister Rosa opens her eyes and sweeps the air in front of the First Lady, so as to tell her to sit back and relax. Sister Rosa closes her eyes again.

Before sitting in the kitchen, while she had waited in the living room, hot from the shelves of burning candles, walls covered in carvings and paintings of the bloody crucifixion, the First Lady almost left. No agony like that in the Methodist church. But still, the imagery grabbed you and didn’t let go. It was so blatant. And that’s why she had come anyway: for the God’s honest truth.

The First Lady had told her aide, “Do not tell anyone I’m coming here. Do not say a word.”

Now in the kitchen, the First Lady ponders the payphone behind Sister Rosa’s left shoulder: What would they think of me visiting a spiritual counsellor? They’d think I was some kind of Nancy Regan loony. Ha! Sister Rosa finishes whispering and opens her eyes. Her calm brown pupils bore into the First Lady, and she feels exposed. Surely Sister Rosa would keep her identity a secret. Wasn’t there a contract they could sign?

Earlier tonight, the First Lady had dined at Tomasita’s, where they’d built a special room and named it after her. She noted the afternoon sun shining through the glass at the top of the small rectangular space, and the scent of the new timbers – the crossway beams they called vigas. The restaurant owners had installed a gold placard with her name above the doorway. No one had ever built a room for her.

After dinner she had her driver bring Secret Service and her aide to the Walgreens to get her some Tums. The green chilli and chicken and fried dough hadn’t sat well. And the First Lady was fairly certain the refried beans were cooked with lard. It tasted delicious at the table – just spicy enough – but once in her belly, it felt all piled up in there, and she thought it probably looked inside of her how it looked on the tin plate it was served on.

Sister Rosa blinks herself fully alert. She takes a small piece of paper from

14

FICTION

A Bohemian Memoir

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Nancy Ludmerer She is fragile, as fragile as glass...

Accustomed to loneliness, I wait, gathering dust, in the breakfront. My mistress’s memory of me has long since faded. She is attended to now by caregivers.

I observe them all – the gentle ones and the not-so-gentle. Be careful, I want to cry out. She is fragile.

A hand reaches in, lifts me, turns me, puts me back. They’re looking for a wine glass to use in the wedding of my mistress’s granddaughter. I have heard that the bride and groom will drink from this special glass. I am excited for the first time in months. Choose me, I want to say. My mistress loves me best.

When I speak of loneliness, it’s because my siblings are gone – three of them broken in careless moments, one stolen, one borrowed and never returned. Our guardian, a gold-nosed decanter, has been turned into a bud vase. That’s why the thought of a new adventure fills me with hope.

They call me Bohemian. But they do not mean I am anti-establishment or unconventional. Rather I am elegant: tinted a roseate glint, with faint etching in a deeper rose all around my girth and a line of gold (faded now, like my mistress) encircling my rim.

I remember my creation: a glowing torch at my birth; a dark-eyed girl gently washing me in a foamy river; a village in Bohemia. I remember the journey with my five siblings and our shapely guardian. I remember a dark hold, and then an unveiling into the light: a gift for my mistress’s wedding.

In my youth, I was used, once a year, in a unique celebration. My mistress filled me with sweet wine and placed me at the centre of a long dining table. After hours of eating and singing, all attention focused on me. My mistress told the children about the prophet Elijah, invisible as air, who would visit and drink from my bowl.

A door opened; a cool breeze stirred the surface of my liquid.

From time to time, my mistress used a different glass for the honour at that annual feast. In those years, when she reached into the breakfront for one of my siblings, or even – a time I will never forget – elevated a water glass to the place of honour, there was something pressing on her mind that distracted her. It happened the first time after her daughter, Alice, left for Japan, never to return, and again after her granddaughter, Stacey, broke her leg ice-skating. Each time, the following year, she came back to me.

I loved her. I still do.

About a year ago, things changed. It started when her son-in-law, Joel, came to visit on a Sunday afternoon. I recognized the sound of his shoes on

919 1

FICTION

Olives Kathy Stevens The biggest change and the worst.

I’m lying in the bath with a jar of olives balanced halfway between my nipples and my bellybutton. It is the flattest part of my flat body, and so is a good surface for a jar of olives. Despite the olives, the room smells strongly of roses. My camouflage trousers, socks, boxers and Iron Maiden t-shirt are in a pile on the floor by the toilet.

I’m keeping the jar steady with my left hand, my right floating beside me.

Every now and then I fish about in the jar for another olive, pop it into my mouth.

Sometimes I manage to catch two at a time, and I feel like an expert fisherman.

My mouth tastes salty and soapy all at once, and as I run my tongue over my teeth and gums to get the last morsels of olive flesh, I find my teeth are fuzzy.

Now I think about it, I can’t remember when I last cleaned them. I take a mental note to do it at the next opportunity. The bits of me that aren’t submerged (knees, left arm, nose) are cold; the fine baby hairs on my legs are standing on end. I wriggle further down and the hot water swishes a little higher up my legs. Steam twists and writhes in spirals on the surface of the water. Everything smells of Mum. Dad had thrown the rose bubble bath away – along with a lot of other things of Mum’s – several days ago, but I snuck out of my room that night, tiptoed past his snores, and downstairs to the kitchen bin. I saved what I could, but Dad’s been eating a lot of baked beans of late, straight out of the can with a soup spoon, and her face flannel and her tubes of makeup and face cream and Vagisil were coated in hardened baked-bean juice, so I left them there. The bubble bath – English Rose, almost full – had been saved from the bean juice by a screwed-up paper towel which acted as a kind of barrier.

The waterline is tickly on my cheeks. My face is an island in a flowery ocean. It is an Egyptian death mask. I think of the movie Face/Off and wonder how much it’d hurt to undergo a face-swapping operation. I don’t know whose face I’d rather have. I don’t think I’d pick anyone I know. Maybe not even a human one.

The funny thing is, I’m not sure I even like olives. I don’t hate them, like I hate fried egg white, the skins of new potatoes, McDonald’s beef burgers. But I can’t say I really enjoy them either. Dad HATES olives. He was going to throw this jar away, but I said I’ll have them and he looked at me like I’d just told him I could fly.

Regardless, he put the jar back in the fridge. The brine was a bit cloudy and he said Whatever, just make sure you give them a sniff first.

I did sniff them, as I ran my bath. They smelt like vinegar and salt and a salad that’d been left too long in the sun. I bring my arm out of the water and see it is swollen with heat, pinkish. My left hand is slim and cool and pale, like Mum’s. I fish in the jar for another olive, almost drop it but catch it at the last second before

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The Prize

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24 24

FICTION

Jenny Bhatt A trip to India, and a change in mindset about how business gets done…

The wives, Meg and Ekta, wanted to try the new Italian restaurant, L’Artusi, for dinner. It is one of the first places in Ahmedabad where you have to book a couple of weeks in advance and, if you are nobody, make that a couple of months. Meg and I are still adrift between the two parallel shores of “nobody” and “somebody”.

Manoj married into an entire dynasty of up-and-coming somebodies and Ekta knew exactly who to call to get us a table.

Meg has been mad for Italy since our college days. After my new business makes enough money, I have promised it will be our first foreign vacation. Another reason I need Manoj, as chairman of our Paradise Heights Society Managing Committee, to help me win this contract. It will be my biggest project yet – in the high seven figures for a three-story building with a gym, banquet hall, and indoor swimming pool. So, yes, my nerves are in knots.

She presses my arm. “Relax. You just have to talk him into accepting your bid tonight. The rest is formalities. You know what I always tell you: if you wish it, you will win it.” She blows me a kiss. All these years, and it never fails to make me want to pull her close and kiss her hard.

Yet, I wonder why Manoj agreed to consider me. There are two other bids: one is from the original society builder, and the other is a medium-sized company like my former employer. I am a small architectural firm. Small with big passion and talent, Meg always corrects me.

Coming into the dinner lounge feels like entering the bottom of the ocean.

Waves of air-conditioned coolness hit our faces. There is a dense sort of darkness everywhere, and the only significant light is from the high ceiling, which is like a blue sky with many-coloured clouds. Looking closer, I find it has been painted with Western classical figures in bright robes.

“Sistine Chapel ceiling,” Meg informs me as we follow a uniformed waiter to our reserved table. “I read it online.”

The place is not crowded yet: a long banquet table at one end filled with some kind of birthday party, three couples, and one other foursome. A few people turn to us, staring more at Meg. Her designer-copy black silk dress shows off her classical statue curves and fair arms and legs. As she sits, the candlelight catches the shimmer of her chandelier earrings and gives her face a translucent golden hue.

Again, I push back the urge to take her into my arms.

Meg orders drinks as our guests have not arrived yet: a Sanbittèr for me and an Aranciata for herself. I have never heard of either before and she pats my hand reassuringly.

ootd

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32 32

FICTION

Eden Summerlee The outfit of the day is ... human skin.

She woke on the eighteenth to find all screens in mourning. She woke puzzled, eyes still shut, puzzled by the stillness of the house, puzzled by the lack of notifications and updates that could have otherwise distracted her from the void in the room. Sitting by the window, she propped up her knees, wrapping her arms around them, realizing, as she held her breath, that some form of catastrophe was about to unfold in her tiny home.

Before looking out the window, she focused on her home. Her quiet home, not looking like itself, because the walls were black in their mourning, and because the absence on the mattress was only surfacing now. She’d started sleeping alone, that’s right. But the sheets were smart, you see, smart enough to keep her just as warm as her absentee used to. Perhaps a solitary life wasn’t for her after all.

She considered calling her operator, because the absentee was probably rethinking this rapture as well, wasn’t he? She stumbled through her conscience, deliberating and almost reaching a conclusion, but before that could happen, the street, which up until now had also been in mourning, began to fill up.

On a normal and non-catastrophic morning, the street usually pours a stream of neon for those scattered and few early risers, a stream in different hues and patterns to keep them from falling ill to monotony. But this morning, when the screens were in mourning, the scattered and few had turned into a throng, a sudden eruption of people, and as soon as she saw them through the shadows, recognizing their nakedness in the dark, it clicked.

That update interrupted by mourning would not reach her for another ten days, but even without the update, she’d figured it out. And knowing crushed her just as it crushed the rest of the population, crushing them enough for them to run out onto the black street, stripped bare, wearing human nakedness in cold protest towards the inevitability of death. Looking away from the window, she stopped breathing again, and then stepped away, stumbling from the glass to manually open her boxes, searching through her drawers for some form of Human skin. But had she ordered it? It was still customary to wear Human skin to prom, but by no means mandatory. She’d been such a rebel as a child, hadn’t she? And her maturing stage took place just as transparency took over the world. Even now, five centuries later, her only opaque feature was her face, albeit owning a transparent skull, one which her operator considered “too radical”. In five hundred years, she’d never thought it necessary to buy herself a Human torso.

Disturbed, blinking rapidly, she sieved through all the glamorous purchas-

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34

Growing Younger

ESSAY

Emily Wildash The role of the bicycle in personal and political change.

Learning to ride a bike as an adult is like that scene in Bambi where she can’t walk on the ice and keeps face-planting, except with less adorable eyelashes. Remember how Thumper charges ahead, spinning about and telling Bambi how easy it is? There’s plenty of that too, except instead of a cartoon rabbit, its lads on bikes doing wheelies or five year olds speeding up a hill while you struggle to even push off.

Learning in London is particularly bad. The city turns into an obstacle course at best, a death wish at worst. Going on the roads is completely out of the question, with over four hundred serious injuries per year and women much more likely than men to be crushed

by HGVs, which isn’t quite how I’d imagined going. Parks aren’t much better. In Hyde Park, the only bit you can really ride along is colonised by MAMILs who still wish they were Lance Armstrong even if he did turn out to be a bit of a dick. Even in parks which have more cycle paths and less yellow jersey wannabes, it’s not great. As an adult on a bike, people think you’re in control of your steed. They randomly stop pushchairs in front of you, joggers refuse to deviate from your path and toddlers career about with an unseeing naivety so adorable when you’re not worried about maiming them. And the seemingly unstoppable fashion for small dogs makes every foray into pet roulette; several park benches have had the pleasure of my front wheel smashing into them as I avoid yet another wheezing pug. Their owners look at me scandalised, how could I have nearly harmed poor little Pugsly? What I really need is a Learner Sign slung around my neck. It would be more effective than the Scream-like contortions of my face as I try to communicate imminent GBH to Pugsly’s owner.

I have, as it happens, worn an L-plate around my neck before. It was on my hen do.

I kept it on all day at the Beyoncé Dance Party Experience (bring your bridal sass!), through the pop-up supper club and when we played pin the tail on the butler in the buff. It survived the East London nightclub where men mistook its red and white lines for target practice. The cultural symbolism of it didn’t make a whole lot of sense then. What was the link between motoring and marriage? What sort of vehicle was I pretending to be – a petite mini? A sexy SUV? Or was it some prurient hint at my upcoming induction to the marriage bed, the red on white harking back to the old tradition of hanging bedsheets smattered with bridal blood out of the marital window? Whatever the lineage of this grand hen do tradition it makes a lot more sense now because two years down the line, I’m getting divorced. It turns out it was a learner marriage after all.

You don’t hear much about young divorce. Generally all the marriage breakdown chat is about how fifty is the new forty, how you can revivify yourself as a mid-life ex-wife, how to do online dating as a silver surfer ... but divorcing at thirty? The least sympathet-

37

ESSAY

Remembrance

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Lindsay Hicks Memories make us…

This was supposed to be about the candles that burnt bright on my grandmother’s red stone mantel while all her grandchildren piled on mountains of quilted blankets in her living room, popcorn- and candy-filled bowls on each lap, while a comedy played on the TV. About the way my grandma would fall asleep twenty minutes in, and pretend to know the events of the entire movie by the time the credits rolled. This was supposed to be about midnight whispers and giggles while the grownups think we are sound asleep. About the early morning tickle fights, pillow fights, and donut-filled food fights. About board games, Simon Says, and Go Fish. About the nine a.m. grandpa talking on the home phone to our mom, telling us to pretend we are sleeping so we can stay an extra hour or two. This was supposed to be about holidays. About the long tables and rows of turkey, mashed potatoes, and fruit salad that made our tummies rumble with delight. About the tree that once stood in the snow-covered mountains, now beautifully decorated by the couch in the corner. About Santa’s lap, losing a tooth, hunting for Easter eggs, and blowing out candles. This was supposed to be about wishbones – how wishbones wishbone. It was even supposed to be about my mother’s homemade chicken noodle soup – she’d knead the fragile dough, cut up the stringy, sticky noodles in symmetrical lines, dice up the colourful veggies into perfect chunks, and with our help, embark in a classic flour fight until we were all covered in white dust (or until dad joined – then it was game over).

This was supposed to be about long car rides in a beat-up suburban that fit everyone comfortably. About camping trips. About prolonged voyages across states, Bohemian Rhapsody blasting through the speakers. About lip-syncing to AC/DC, Queen, Nirvana, and mom’s favourite, Madonna. This was supposed to be about dad’s rough tan hands, and the way his wedding ring was always a little too tight. About the way those same hands would hold mom’s in the passenger seat. This was even supposed to be about making playful fun of people with RVs, who thought camping meant sleeping in a bed, with a shower and toilet.

About waking up with the hot sun shining through steamy tents, the sound of crackling wood and the fresh smell of pine trees. This was supposed to be about the hunt in the forest for the perfect stick that would be used to roast delicious treats by the fire. About one-piece polka-dotted swimsuits, sunblock, and pigtail braids.

Or maybe it was supposed to be about the way hair slowly starts to fade to grey, or the soft tiptoes of bare feet walking at night, past bedtime, or the small three-foot tree in the front yard that made us all wonder why we were bigger than it – the same tree that we dirtfooted children would try to see who could hurdle the highest without hurting ourselves.

Maybe this was supposed to be about pyjama day, crazy-hair day, or mismatch day at school.

About the innocent “boys vs girls” competitions in the backyard: jump the rope five times,

141 4

FICTION

The Disappearance of a She-Vampire in Pattaya Prabda Yoon The biggest change and the worst.

Before she disappeared, she was spotted arm in arm with a bald, burly, Russian. At least that was the rumour, picked up and passed on by the motorbike-taxi drivers who plied their trade at the entrance to Pattaya Walking Street.

But some of the local bar girls recalled otherwise. Russian my ass, they said, She left with a boy, a skinny kid, eight years old, or maybe ten.

The drivers were one hundred percent certain that she was dead – murdered. They were willing to bet that her body would have been hacked to pieces, stuffed into a trash bag, weighted down, and then tossed into the ocean not too far from the shore. The bar girls, on the other hand, were convinced that she and the boy had gone overseas. Maybe even to Europe, to start a new life. Good for her, they said, Human blood is all contaminated nowadays. There's no way of telling what filth you might be drinking. If a vampire can manage to quit the habit, she ought to get out of the game while she still can. Sure, people might say she's betraying her own kind, or even herself, but so what? Being a vampire in Pattaya isn't what it was. That’s the long and short of it.

And the official line taken by the police? According to them, she'd never existed in the first place. And as someone who doesn't exist can't flee the country any more than they can get hacked to bits, there was nothing for them to investigate. You’d have to be crazy to think we'd waste our time on a tall tale like that. If you’re talking about the bar girls, the whores, the lady boys, the chicks with dicks, the go-go dancers, the drug dealers, OK, fair enough, them you'll find everywhere . As for the Russian mafia, let's both do ourselves a favour and leave that one well alone. But the vampires of Pattaya? That’s nothing but a story people made up to keep their kids from straying too near the Walking Street.

You're not going to buy that shit, are you? the elderly coconut vendor spat, his voice dripping scorn. Of course she existed. She bought two of my coconuts. One for herself, one for her victim. She had a big heart, that vampire.

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There is change in all things. You yourself are subject to continual change and some decay, and this is common to the entire universe.

-Marcus Aurelius (Meditations) Shuffling around the city of Bangkok, it isn’t hard to pick out the shells of abandoned buildings spread about the vast metropolis of this Southeast Asian hub. It’s a city brimming with life, colour, and lustrous corporate modernity, but amongst the urban landscape are a number of striking concrete skeletons of decay. Many of these buildings are the remnants of what were once grandiose plans for offices, hotels, or upscale condominiums, projects abandoned due to the sudden financial shock brought about by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Thailand was one of the countries most affected by what is known locally as “Tom-yum-goong” crisis, named as such because the reasons behind the collapse are as complex as the ingredients of a bowl of the country’s signature spicy dish. While a number of locations in Bangkok and around Thailand were abandoned due to economic predicament, others were left to Spiral to the Roof I.C.E. Tower, Bangkok

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Dax Ward

PHOTOGRAPHY

Training for writing drama across different media contexts > MA/MFA Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media

www.cssd.ac.uk/litro CSSDLondon

LITRO MAGAZINE

Changes #160

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