"A Long, Slow Ride Through Town on the Way to the River to Get Her Brains Blown Out"

A Long, Slow Ride Through Town on the Way to the River to Get Her Brains Blown Out

For a moment much longer than a mere instant, I felt the bonds of eye contact with one of the convicted. She looked young, certainly no older than mid-twenties. A roly-poly criminal, a moon-faced dumpling-girl in a pink quilted jacket with unraveling pigtails. Her acne was a red mask down her forehead and beneath her eyes.

The truck carrying the convicted slowed to lurch through deep potholes at the intersection. The placard around her neck announced her crimes: excessive fascination with foreign videos, prostitution. One had apparently led to the other, but I couldn’t decipher which. Her dunce cap was somewhat tilted, and the way her head limply bobbed with the movement of the truck made me wonder if it might not fall off altogether. This depended on how tired she was from riding in the truck and how drugged she’d been into docility.

Our eyes clicked together, she with her wrists bound and riding in the back of one the People’s Liberation Army trucks under machine gun-armed escort to her execution and I enjoying a lukewarm Xian Beer with my one-eighth kilo bowl of noodles at the roadside shack the foreigners called Jiaozi Hut. She seemed to hold herself only vaguely erect, but I saw her still register some surprise when she saw me. It was as if somewhere still inside her, some country-girl, pre-western video, pre-prostitution part of herself was still able to exclaim, “Oh, look! A foreigner! A yangguizi!”¹

I felt an urge to wave, to move my arm and hand together in a friendly gesture, but by then the truck had waddled through the rough spots in the Number 3 Road and was pretty much gone.

1. “foreign dead demon/ghost”

“A Long, Slow Ride Through Town on the Way to the River to Get Her Brains Blown Out,” a sample from Artificial Rats and Electric Cats, by Robert Masterson.

Trade paperback, poetry and prose.
Foreword by Carl Petersen.
85 pages.
Perfect binding.
Four-color cover, acid-free paper throughout.
ISBN 0-9727455-6-4

Price: $14.00
Shipping and handling: $2.00

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