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I become tense, and my eyes become wary
as I enter.
The red lanterns tower high above,
and take on slow, cryptic sways,
The infernal glow, seeping from the shadowy ceiling
down to the
humans.
I feel my grip tightening around my mother’s hand.
Hundreds of people shove against me,
yelling Cantonese bargains,
clutching baskets full of food.
All that penetrates my ears are incessant,
muffled murmurs.
The smell of dripping blood and raw flesh
begins to envelope me in its
dark, dense cloak.
It numbs the senses, and slithers up the nostrils
like poisonous
snakes, corrupting me with venom.
Chop, chop!
I glimpse a frog, laying lifeless on a board,
freshly hacked into
quarters.
Slap!
A man bludgeons a wet, writhing wrasse
with the side of his knife.
He jams his fingers down the gills without hesitation.
I cringe as he thrusts his knife
deep into its side and makes a long,
flowing cut,
Displaying bones and rosy flesh, with blood
streaming down silver
scales, gleaming a painful red.
Its heart still pumps.
The chickens give sharp, ear-piercing shrieks
as they wait, imprisoned
in metal cages,
Unknowing of their fates –
their flesh, chewed and mutilated,
searing in caustic juices of human
stomachs.
The cage door gives its ominous creak.
A hand plunges into the huddling crowd
Wrenched by the neck, pried from its pitiful refuge,
The squawking victim is taken to the back.
Chop.
Rows of glazed ducks hang stiff and motionless
above me, hooks through
pierced, tired necks,
Attached to sagging heads, eyes shriveled.
They dangle like ornaments of death –
The oven-smothered corpses glitter under light bulbs,
luring hungry
customers
With withered skin, and steaming, dead flesh.
But suddenly, my nose becomes tingled and aroused.
An enchanting, exquisite scent arrives,
prancing nimbly about the
odors of death.
Flowers – elegant roses, delicate orchids, and
exotic birds of
paradise,
Blooming with the sharpest of blues, and
the deepest of reds.
I am utterly unable to resist such pulchritude –
I must escape the
killing and reach the florist!
But I cannot – my mother pulls me away.
She needs pork.
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