Коллектив авторов - Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

The sex and booze had done the job for him: out like a light. Typical! But she was still turned on like flashing neon.

Next to her on the easel was the nearly finished canvas. She stood up to look at it-a voluptuous nude. She flashed back to the mirror-then to the canvas, then the mirror again. She undid the red silk dressing gown at the waist and opened herself for objective appraisal. Who is this person? Do I still know her? The breasts were certainly not as perky as a twenty-year-old’s and she saw the evidence of a little-dare she say it-paunch! My God!

A man’s word for a woman’s tummy. What is happening to me? There was some shadow of fuzz on the upper lip, a stray hair or two on the chin these days growing faster between tweezer attacks. Yes, Francisca was losing her soft feminine edge to a menopausal creature known as Fran the frump. She was becoming thick brush strokes, like a Rouault painting: man-solid, deep-vowelled.

Yet it wasn’t the bagginess of her skin that disturbed her so much as what it all stood for: no partner, no family, no orthodox identity except an executive position which was now under attack from those “Hello Kitties” scratching at her heels. She had to keep on top, swat them like flies … She was known as a tough nut to crack in her industry, but under that hard shell, she was sensitive: someone who tried to manifest her realness through one-woman shows in a friend’s art gallery. Alas, she was only a part-time artist in a Sunday-painter country with little art appreciation or market potential.

Francisca reached for the cleanser and tissues and began clearing up the mascara-disaster area.

“Oh God,” she shuddered, closing her eyes in fright. She stood up, turning to look at the bed where the whale-man was snoring. She turned her back, leaning against the window, looking at the self-portrait. She needed comforting, so she closed her eyes again and let a well-trained finger stray below the embarrassing belly to the bearded-lady lips of herself and, imagining her finger as a delicate paintbrush, started doing what she normally did at the easel: shutting out the left-over white noise of her workday to look for that other Face, the ideal woman within herself. She then began to re-create its lines and contours, working her finger-brush this way and that.

The sexual heat began to build like the first kindling placed on a match-blaze. It grew gradually with focus and effort to twig-bright redness. She kept her eyes closed and felt her left calf muscle going taut as a bowstring as her body remembered this fiery dance for one-all the while dwelling on the image of the younger woman she knew so well, the one she had starved, exercised, then bounced through nightclubs and parties with European men and big expense accounts.

This laughing, joking woman had been the wild one with a reputation for doing the most daring things in beachfront chalets all weekend long. She warmed to that bright young image as she worked the finger-brush, painting a face like a miniature portrait on the red ruby of her clitoris-a face all lips and tongue now finding the sweet-spot. Rising on her toes she embraced the full force of her orgasm, shuddering with hot, delicious stabs.

Feeling revitalized, she imagined a new beginning with a clean slate and felt her feet soften into the floor again. As she opened her eyes to the reddened cheeks of a woman flashed sideways in the mirror, Francisca realized she was still that empowered woman. She was not down-and-out. She didn’t need the man-whale beached in the bed behind her. No one had ensnared her in any domestic tussle. She had a job, she had her house (almost paid off), she had her CPF savings. All was not lost. Above all, there was her art. Yes, that had always served even if it didn’t make any money. She could still paint, could still create. Francisca still had a way of being honest with herself, despite the prowling diversions of her tiger-woman lifestyle.

The morning light was just beginning to do its little halo-dance around the outlines of apartment blocks. A shaft of it began to walk a finger through the slit in the curtain. Francisca took it as a signal to action and stepped up to the canvas. She lifted a brush from the Chinese inkstand on the table next to the easel where she kept her materials. She looked at the green soapstone piece carved with three monkeys ascending a mountain. The pool at the bottom was the muddy pot that she now dabbed into like a water-bird taking a morning drink.

How strange! The climbing monkeys now seemed to be laughing and joking. How foolish one can be, possessed by moods and darkness . Francisca grabbed her palate and felt like flinging it up like pizza dough, but restrained herself. Instead, she squeezed out some colour onto its paint-scarred face, then began intoning her mock mantra as she did before commencing any work at the easel: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Such a silly saying, yet for her it meant that she could turn a blind eye to the necessary sins of her day job. She didn’t have to listen to the bleating voices of family expectations and she wouldn’t ever have to speak again to this latest jerk slumbering in her bed, once she sent him off without breakfast .

She focused her eyebrows as if she was a mathematician searching for a way to crack the formula.

With her brush, she added a few final touches around the lips and softened the lines of the painted tummy, then signed the portrait in the bottom right hand corner. Then she moistened her finger with her own wetness, dipped it in the red paint on the palate and, with a flourish, dotted the “i”.

If you could, would you choose the way you were going to die? What would it be? More importantly, would you use it when the time was right?

These were questions Koh Kwan How and his friends often tossed around when he was much younger. Now almost all those friends were gone, and Kwan How was looking at joining them soon. At eighty-three, he had seen a lot of life and too much of death. And now he knew, very much so, which way he would choose. And yes, he was ready to use it. He knew what constituted the perfect exit. And he also knew that it was just about the right time.

All his pleasures were being snatched from him: old friends, loved ones, places he had known and loved. And now even simple, everyday pleasures were being stripped away. It seemed every time he went to his doctor, the man had another list of things he had to deny himself. Kwan How had begun calling the man Dr No: no spicy food, no Kopi-O, no alcohol, no pets …

no, no, no. And, of course, no major physical exertion. His heart was far too weak, his doctor warned, just couldn’t take sudden exertion. “No sex, of course,” the pompous shit had instructed him. Then he had the gall to add, with that smug grin men like him seemed to take pleasure in, “But I guess in your case, that hasn’t been any real temptation for a long time, has it, Mr Koh?”

That ass! Koh was tempted almost every day, at least twenty times. Just because he could no longer act on it … Until about ten years ago, maybe less, he would make his way to Geylang once every fortnight. He’d look around, see what was on offer, then head off to a massage parlour or take a hotel room with one of the pretty China girls who trawled the coffee shops there, looking for old men like him with their plump pensions. What mainly transpired with these girls, at either the parlours or in the hotels, was what Koh and his friends used to call “a quick, helpful handshake below the waist.” Well, he was an old man, even then.

But he still yearned, achingly, to make love to lovely young women as he had many years before, when he himself was much closer to their age. But that, he knew, was just the faint buzz of a dream he could never act upon. Or so he thought.