Free Swamp Foetus by Poppy Z. Brite

and Mack pranced a bit, happy to be performing again. He stood still at center stage, staring out at the crowd.
    He could see faces in the first few rows; they were watching him, wanting him, wanting the deepest part of him. Who would he hurt tonight? Who would go home and put a gun to his forehead—who would hurt a person she loved—who would lose his mind?
    No one.
    No one at all, if he knew what he was doing.
    He sang the first song. He threw himself into it so hard that by the end of the song he was on his knees, clutching the microphone with both hands, pushing every bit of air in his body into the notes. His glory had reached its crescendo. If anyone noticed the wetness on his cheeks, they thought it was sweat. He held the last note of the song for a full minute.
    The crowd went wild.
    It was time to fly.
    He eased himself up, trembling, and went to the rear of the stage where the wires dangled. They glinted gold and silver and all the colors of the stage lights, thin as hairs but strong enough, together, to support a hundred and thirty-five pounds of him. He began attaching them to the hooks on his harness. When he came to the last wire, the one that supported the largest part of his weight, he glanced into the wings. The tech nodded, ready to pull him up.
    He looped the wire around his neck and gave the signal.
    1980
    He got up and walked away from the piano to the window. Fine mist from the crashing of the waves on the rocks was hitting the glass—there would be a storm soon. He might sit by the long window and watch its glorious fury.
    He returned to the piano and played a little more, a sprinkling, dancing tune that skipped across the polished floor. He rested his cheek on the top of the piano, loving its sleek coolness against his skin. His hand strayed to his throat and stroked the tight, shiny scar that stretched nearly from ear to ear. His fingers traced the jagged line of it. He remembered the relief he’d felt, waking after the hours of impossibly delicate surgery, when the doctor told him his vocal cords had been severed and he would never talk—let alone sing—again.
    He sat at his piano for a while. Then, when the long, sweet sound of serenity had completely filled him, he went to the window to watch the storm.
    (1985)

Xenophobia
    I hated Robert. He thought he was a Punk Rocker. He wore one pink hightop sneaker and one yellow, and he never washed his hair, so it stood up in filthy little twists all over his head. When I took him down to Chinatown, I was hoping I could get him drunk and sell him to some unscrupulous Chinese chef for big money. It’s said they use dead cats. Why not Robert Foo Yung?
    He talked so much on the bus (about uninteresting things like the book of poisonous recipes he was writing) that we got off at the wrong stop and found ourselves in the porn district. The light of the setting sun was as red as desire. X’s paraded across every marquee. The poster girls’ nipples and lipstick had long since faded to a dusty orange. The signs and lampposts and even the square of sidewalk we stood on seemed to vibrate silently in the hellish glow, as if some enormous city-machine thrummed far below the pavement. “You’ve gotten us lost,” said Robert, licking his lips nervously, and then we rounded a corner and saw the pinnacle of Chinatown’s first gaudy pagoda rising above the city.
    The streets of Chinatown thrilled me, but my excitement was spiked with a vein of clear unease. I sometimes wonder whether my large Caucasian presence was merely tolerated on the exotic streets, perhaps even found secretly amusing. At night the lights of Chinatown turn the sky bright purple, and the banners hung from balcony to scrolled balcony crack in the wind like shots, their messages unreadable (Good Health? Long Life? Get Fucked?). There seems always to be a smell of gunpowder and hot sesame oil in the air. The neon runs together in a blaze of colors, red and white and green and gold and azure,