Sublime

The nurse was a sick-looking man with grey, translucent teeth. He sucked them, audibly, as we walked. I wondered if he’d begun working here as a healthy person and then slowly absorbed the aura of madness and death surrounding him. I wondered what I was absorbing in my line of work.

ascetic

A woman for whom the gender divide between male and female is coming apart as she returns to the state of being only a human being, as she was long ago when she was born.

The dead are close,

a semidiasporic postcolonial indeterminate like me

opium bed

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful.

Local Boys Found After 72-Hour Search, read one headline paired with a black-and-white photograph of two skinny-limbed kids in cargo shorts and sneakers posing for a camera. The picture had been taken at his twelfth birthday. Eddie had pushed him into the swimming pool with his flip-phone still in his pocket an hour later and they’d had a muddy fis

To trace the inhabitant’s identity, Dr. Lee consulted the resident directory that Professor Jung had obtained a while back by bribing a senior employee of the Security Guardhouse. All he found listed in the directory was “Film Actor P.” Deciding that sorting things out in person would be faster, Dr. Lee hopped into an elevator and headed up to Leve