Severed

Another hot, ruthless day in China, the same yellowed sidewalk, the same distant couples with their minds remote from the lives of the beggars, and vendors, and death and despair of the lower class. As a teenager, I lost my arm in a factory, condemned to join the horrors of Shanghai. My parents beat me. They burn my legs and bruise my back so I will evoke more pity – more money. I know this is unnecessary for I have already been reduced to nothing.

A young girl – American? Canadian? – scuttles past, knuckles white, face flushed. A normal day in my life frightens her. She is like a fish picked out of the ocean and forced to grow human lungs and breathe the filthy air. I see the street from her perspective: the sun diminished to an orange blob in the thick pollution, so many bobbing black heads, vendors with sticky, yellow teeth and pale, cracked lips, like rotting fish with itching hands and threatening eyes, grouse, beg, chant, lure.

“Watch! For pretty lady?” He winks, she squirms, he smiles. A man throws an apple core at my bare feet.

“Real tiger!” coos a man, stroking a large orange rug. She escapes into a building – to her, a looming cathedral – a sanctuary.

This is how it will always be: vendors, like vultures, air pungent and heavy, cold fear, squawks and curses. And I sit cross-legged against the grimy wall, following the tourists – whose origin I ponder – with my sunken eyes.