She used to take showers, but now sometimes, she can barely stand. She resolves only to take baths, but then she realises they use more water. At work, her mind is constantly drifting, a new acquisition is a bird inside her chest fluttering to escape the cage within. Her rejects on the production line reach a new factory high. QC Manager Pu has words: ‘Concentrate girl,’ he says, waving his pencil like a baton, ‘You know you get paid by the piece. At this rate you’ll never be able to pay off your apartment, go bowling with the girls.’ But somehow, Lu Xi’s hands are like putty, she has no more feeling in her fingers and she isn’t much thinking about bowling. ‘What you need is a good man,’ says her friend, Mai Dan. ‘Does your mother not push you to get married?’ Perhaps that’s it, thinks Lu Xi at lunch, struggling to hold down her rice, thumping her chest to quieten the bird inside. Yet, there is something else that bothers her. Something more than the bird. It feels like a snake is squirming inside her intestines. Perhaps the bird is trying to eat the snake, she thinks. But there is no explanation for her legs, for her hands like putty.
Marc Vincenz was born in Hong Kong. His first novel, Animal Soul, is forthcoming by Shanghai Wen Hui in Mandarin. Currently based out of Iceland, he writes a column for the Reykjavik Grapevine, Iceland’s English-language newspaper. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in various journals and magazines including Open Letters Monthly, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), Prick of the Spindle and Shipwrights.