MicroHorror

Only when the hilt has a ring of red around it does she pull the knife out from between my ribs. I lean back on the velvet couch, my dick pointing at her, my belt opened down around my thighs. I haven’t touched the Tsing Tao. The unopened bottle stands on the edge of a table in the center of the karaoke room.

The whore whistles some sailor song as she pulls her pantyhose back up her chubby legs. She hops up from the couch where only moments ago she was spread eagle and awaiting my purchased intercourse. She taps the door with the back of her hand.

A man in an Adidas tracksuit pokes his head in. She nods yes to whatever he asks and satisfied, he gets on his cell and blathers rapidly. I only know enough Cantonese to order in a restaurant.

It feels like the knife is still in my side, wiggling around in the nerves. I hold my hands over the wound instinctively. My legs are too cold and numb to run. My mouth is too wrenched tight from the pain that I can’t say anything when she grabs my cheek and shakes it.

“You so fat. They will pay more,” she says.

The whore smiles at me with a mix of pity and vindictiveness. There is a gap between her front teeth that I didn’t notice when agreeing to climb the narrow staircase down into this place.

My blood slides down the folds in my gut and pools under my back. It feels like there is enough to drown in. I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have told my wife to stay at the hotel while I supposedly had a drink. The man having a seizure when I first walked in, knocking over barstools with his cowboy boots, should have deterred me.

The whore readjusts her bra, where my hands were just fumbling. She snaps off the bottle cap of the beer with her teeth.

“You already pay this,” she says when she hands it to me.

I put my sticky red hand out and take the bottle. Of all the deaths I’ve imagined, this was not one of them. They all had a few more grains of dignity and the beer was at least cold.