The Shanghai Murders

LETTER INTERCEPTED FROM THE POST BOX AT THE SHANGHAI INTERNATIONAL EQUATORIAL HOTEL

Dearest Sister,

I went on a dead man’s walk today, breasting the air that the murdered man had pushed before him, not two days earlier. His name was Ngalto Chomi and he was a six-foot seven-inch black man from Zaire. He was hacked to bits in an alley off Fu Yu in the old city. The temple gods in their shrine around the corner did him no good. This city simply opened a crack and accepted his soul without a pause in its race toward oblivion.

None of this came clear to me until I saw the merchant skin the snake in the marketplace. Skin the snake while it still lived. Skin the snake as he had skinned another snake two days earlier while the black man had watched. Watched because he had bought the snake and taken it with him to a restaurant to be cooked.

But it wasn’t the snake that brought home the meaning. It was the skin. Still alive with electrical pulses, it lashed back and forth on the ground, seemingly unaware that its life, its core, was now in the hands of a man with a knife. I thought of Richard. Like the skin of the snake, on the ground, a knife already having removed his life from him with one deft stroke. Dead, but he didn’t even know it. Like the chimera of life in the skin of the snake.

Amanda

TO BE SHREDDED