Stories (.pdfs decently sized for mobile devices):
THE FIRST CHRISTMAS
OPEN LETTER TO FUNGUS/FUNGI
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A Pair of Excerpts of Upstart Crows II:
Beloved Strangers (an excerpt)
Maria Chaudhuri
In 1971 my parents lived in a bungalow on the top of a hill in Chittagong, where my father worked at the head office of the Bangladesh Tobacco Company. My mother stayed at home with one-year-old Naveen, the old Nepali ayah, and Harun, the cook. The garden was the best part of their sprawling Colonial-style bungalow. Huge red dahlias and bushes of wild tulips sprung robustly out of the mountain earth. When the midday sun grew softer, the ayah took Naveen out in the stroller for long walks. My mother sat in the secluded garden and sipped cup after cup of tea. But the nights were bad. The sound of gunfire, sirens, and hand grenades serenaded the dark. Every once in a while, screams floated up the lonely mountain roads. Or did she imagine them? One time my mother woke up in the middle of the night and her heart caught at her throat to see a mean face pressed against the windowpane. It was only a fox, she’d come to realize, when in the morning she found a bird, half-eaten and caked in dried blood, just outside her window. She must have been lonely, in that strange city, away from her family, in the middle of the war.
The Pakistani soldiers came at midday, when my father was at work and Harun had gone to the market. The ayah was playing with Naveen. My mother opened the door. “They were very tall,” she recalled, “tall in that Pakistani way.” Their eyes swept over her slim body. They were polite, even when they walked into our living room, uninvited. They didn’t raise their voices or utter obscenities. They walked in as if they were always going to walk into our house, as if our house was not the sacred body that gave us shelter but the body that could be entered by anyone. My mother didn’t try to stop them. She stood near the door and watched them. Then they heard my sister’s voice, chattering away with the ayah. A child? A girl? They must see her, immediately.
Things were shifting, happening too fast, as if in a disjointed dream. The ayah stifled a scream as one of the soldiers took Naveen from her arms. The next second, her jaw dropped as he hugged her to his chest and kissed her on both cheeks. “I have a daughter, just her age,” he said. The soldiers gave my sister a small piece of candy before they left.
The war ended in a year. East Pakistan gained its independence from West Pakistan, and Bangladesh was born out of the dismemberment. Outside a beautiful bungalow on the hill, on quiet afternoons, sat the solitary figure of a young woman, her spirit moving above and beyond the mountains.
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Exeunt, to Screaming (an excerpt)
JD Reid
A few years ago, I picked up some work as some sort of bus coordinator. This entailed getting a bus-load of people onto a bus, driving across town, and then sitting in the parking lot with the bus driver until the people were done getting shit-faced. I started talking to the bus driver, who was clearly insane. While I sat there, wondering why my watch was going so slow, he started to tell me his Vietnam War stories. That piqued my interest. Apparently this guy was a POW2. He was captured somewhere outside of the Mekong Delta3, and soon was subjected to the horrors of dink4 torture. After a year of torture, he got fed up, this bus driver. “I can still see that little dink’s face, going, ‘You dirty American.’” He said this in the most stereotypical way you could impersonate an angry Asian saying “You dirty American.” The bus driver told me he decided to get the hell out of Dodge. He told me that it’s a war crime to escape from your captors5, but he didn’t give a shit by that point. One day, he found an opportunity. He broke one of these little dinks’ necks—he’s a big guy, this bus driver. Then he got his hands on an M-60 that just happened to be lying around somewhere.
Factoid: The M-60 is a 7.62 mm machine gun, nicknamed “The Pig.” The gun fires nine rounds a second, weighs twenty-three pounds, and retails for about six thousand dollars. Usually two fellows operate, one to feed the metal belt, and the other to feed Hell. However, one fellow can certainly use it himself. Typically, the M-60 is mounted on the sides of Huey helicopters, but occasionally is found lying around, unguarded, in the middle of a POW camp.
The bus driver grabs this gas-operated, open-bolt piece of US Military Industrial Complex awesomeness and sticks it up to the back of his captor: Mr. “You dirty American.”
On the bus, he asked, “Have you ever seen a body disintegrate? Just melt away into a fuckin’ puddle?”
“No, sir,” I replied; “I don’t believe I have.”
Once he finished that business, he released a few other fellows, who managed to overthrow a couple of the leftover dinks. One they kept, because of some particularly heinous torture he put them through. This dink wanted a smoke. The bus driver told me, “I wanted to see what would happen if I put C-4 into a Zippo.” (C-4 is a plastic explosive and will fuck you up.) So he gave the Zippo to the dink, who tried to calm himself by having a quick smoke. When he lit the Zippo, his head disappeared. “I guess that’s what happens,” concluded the bus driver, kind of giggling.
He escapes and finds a boat or whatever and gets the hell outta there. He tells me that Colin Powell was personally very angry with him for killing his way out of the bamboo village, then court-martialed him. He said that Colin Powell was an asshole. Then he said that when he got back to America, a “faggot” called him a baby killer, and so he knocked the guy out on the cool airport floor. He also said that every time he saw an Asian face, he wanted choke that person to death. And now he’s your friendly neighborhood bus driver.