The Lips That She Kisses Her Children to Bed With and The Lips That She Brings Her Husband's Penis to Ejaculation

A Short Compilation of Short Stories and 55 Fiction:
    1. Skandal Melayu
    2. Of Lust and Slut, and the Girl in the Tudung
    3. To Look at Girls and See Sexual Beasts
    4. If Fashion is Your Trade, Then When You're Naked, I Guess You Must Be
     Unemployed (Yeah?)
    5. If She Puts Effort into How She Looks, Then It is Okay to Stare
    6. Smoking Girls Make Irresponsible Mothers
    7. Untitled #3
    8. Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits


Skandal Melayu

He is surprised to find himself startled at the sight of the naked Malay girl posing for the camera. She sits on the edge of a queen-size bed in a luxurious hotel room with her legs crossed and her smile alluring, and she exposes herself to the memory of the film. She has a hauntingly sweet smile, so carefree and so innocent; she does not seem to care that she is topless and in full view. There is something in her eyes, something unsettling about her, about all this, but he does not know what.

Through the darkened glass window and out into the balcony, he can see the sea. On the sandy white beach, along the receding shoreline far into the teeth of the sea, he can see a family of four walking back from a weekend seaside picnic: the father and the basket, the mother and her tudung, the girl and her pelampung, the boy and his beach ball. On the wall of the room and at the head of the bed, right in the middle and large and clear, he can see the mascot, and the flag, and the famous mosque, and the two towers, and the iconic train station, and the red hibiscus, and the words: "Welcome to Malaysia, 1997".

At first, she was with her essential undies on, but gradually, she removes an item of her clothing one by one, and layer by layer, and the camera keeps rolling on, snap by snap, and roll by roll, and she smiles. Her light brown skin glistens from the flash of the camera, and her wavy black hair rests on her shoulder and down onto her two supple breasts, partially covering her dark large nipples, to tantalize. Her petite body dances to the movement of the camera, as if she is unaware that there will be many pairs of prying eyes behind the lens. Her eyes, they remain in contact with his, and she stares back into him, as he slowly becomes hypnotized by her beauty; and she smiles a familiar smile, and tosses her hair back.

He has seen many naked photos of young girls before, of various color and of various built, some were from the internet and some were from magazines, in this position and in that position, tied up, gagged, raped, force-fed, whipped, slapped, poked; he has seen so many of them, these horny sluts, to the point that he no longer sees them as human beings, but merely pretty faces with picture-perfect bodies deserving of no honor and respect, but he has never seen one that is such as familiar to him personally as this one; the Malay girl might have been a close friend's little sister, or the neighbor's daughter next door, or perhaps one day be the mother to the children of his younger brother, or that maybe her father and his dad once shared a praying space in a mosque on a Friday to work, or simply that she reminds him of his mother and aunts and cousins, or that she has the kind of family similar to his: a father, a mother, a few brothers, with good friends and fun neighbors, and stories to tell, and laughter to share.

Suddenly, he feels wrong to stare, and he refrains from touching himself, disgusted.


Of Lust and Slut, and the Girl in the Tudung

You can actually see the shine in her eyes as she stood there under the stairs, looking up to see you looking down at her, horrified. In a microsecond, hundreds of thousands of thoughts ran through her head. She sees the face of her mother and the saliva bubbles at the edges of her lips, and she sees the face of her father and the palm of his hand flying all over her pale cheeks, and she sees the faces of her sisters and the fingernails that are digging her bloodshot eyes out, and she sees the faces of her brothers and the hockey sticks that are smashing her skull to pulp, and she sees the faces of her neighbors, and the faces of her high school colleagues, and the faces of her coworkers, and the faces of her close friends.

You can actually feel the muscle of her stomach churn, and the blood in her veins freeze, and the pupils of her eyes contract, and the dignity of her soul rot; she is now without the quality worthy of respect, an old discarded rug that smells of piss and puss and puke. An early death would do her no justice, no relief.

You can actually hear the hysterical cries of the righteous mob, for miles away you can spot the flame of their torch, and they chant like tempestuous banshees: "Hypocrites! Whores! Remove your headscarves!" It is now never about the girl, it never was; had it been a Malay girl in a short pink miniskirt, a white tube top and leather platform pumps, had it been a Chinese girl under the influence of ecstasy, had it been an Indian girl prostituting her way out of college, had it been done in the dark closet of the janitor's storage room of a kindergarten, had it been between a 40 year-old father and his 13 year-old step-daughter, had it been UKM students having a free-for-all gang-bang in a rented apartment, the whole weight of the world would not have crushed to the death of a single ill cockroach. She was in a tudung and a stereotype was killed.

Much to the joy of the liberal sinners, much to the hype of the frantic media, much to the cynical smile of the girls without the tudung, much to the anger of the religious zealots, much to the dismay of the Sisters-in-Islam, much to the tears of the dead prophets, much to the shame of the believers of the Islamic state, much to the apathy of the ruling party, much to the cause of the human rights activists, much to the ridicule of the comedian in all of us, much to the enjoyment of the lovers of pornography.

And the boyfriend sinks his face into his hands, hoping the world would forget about him.


To Look at Girls and See Sexual Beasts

My uncle and I, he is three years older than me, we used to like to stay under the shade of the guava tree in the backyard of my grandfather's house in the afternoon, munching on sugar cane cut down from the kebun, while we waited for the cows to graze the green grass on the banks of Sungai Sementa.

"Kau ada awek, Along?"
"Takde. Cik? Cik Im ada awek?"
"Takde. Dulu ada, tapi dia pindah gi Klang."
"Ada apa kat Klang?"

The only good way to get to the natural sweetness of the sugar cane, as I was taught, is to bite off the layer of the hard skin using your front and side teeth, and slowly chewing from the middle to the sides.

"Awek Cik tu dulu ada taik lalat kat bawah mata dia. Kat sini."
"Lawa ke dia?"
"Lawa lah! Tengok kaki sikit lah, brader! Tak lawa, tak main ah."
"Lawa macam Saira Banu ke?"

In the old days, before the invention of Coca-Cola and such, kampong folks used to take along with them a bundle of sugar cane slashed down into shorter sticks, tied to the backseat of their bikes, to the high school soccer field to watch an open-air wall-projected movie, and they would munch on sugar cane like it was popcorns.

"Kalau pompuan ada tahi lalat sini, tahu apa maksud dia?"
"Apa?"
"Kuat beromen, Long."
"Cis, kencing ah! Takde kaitan langsung! Pandai je reka."

It's a pretty efficient tool, too, the sugar cane sticks, if suddenly a cow tries to graze at the greener side of the river, whose plot of land was owned by the rich Chinese of the kampong; you can use it as a cowboy whip or a throwing stick.

"Wak Jenal yang bagitahu Cik rahsia tahi lalat tu."
"Ntah ye ntah idak Wak Jenal tu."
"Nak tahu part badan mana sama warna dengan puting tetek pompuan?"
"Mana?"

My other uncle, Cik Adi, he now runs my grandfather's sugar cane kebun. He first started doing serious business with it when he was twenty-three by selling fresh air tebu at the local pasar malam to support his day job as a car mechanic in Kapar, Klang. After eight weeks of business, he bought himself a brand new minivan.

"Cik rasa Wak Jenal tak bohong ah, Long."
"Apsal lak?"
"Pasal ustaz Cik ada cakap, memang ada petua dia."
"Petua rahsia tahi lalat?"

Cik Im and I, we used to help Cik Adi in the air tebu business during the weekends, oiling the crusher machine, stacking up the cut down sugar cane, loading the ice bags, setting up the stall at the pasar malam spot, covering his shift during the Maghrib and Isyaa prayers, handling the sea of customers, and cleaning up afterwards; and we get paid a hefty sum for the job. The air tebu business is quite the lucrative business in the pasar malam circuit.

"Kawan Cik yang kat madrasah cakap, dia ada belajar benda macam tu."
"Ustaz dia ajar ke Cik?"
"Tahu tak apsal bila nak kahwin, si lelaki boleh tengok tangan si pompuan?"
"Ada dalam Islam ke? Benda tu bukan adat ke?"

Nowadays, nobody would go the length to munch down on sugar cane in the heat of the afternoon, not even the dozens of grandkids the old man has running around his decrepit house. Back in the kampong, whenever somebody offers me a sugar cane to chew on, I find myself hard to resist from saying 'no', even if munching it means ruining my shirt or staining my pants. I used to look at sugar cane as nothing more than a kampong boy's beverage, but now, I look at sugar cane and I see fond memories of jaga lembu.


If Fashion is Your Trade, Then When You're Naked, I Guess You Must Be Unemployed (Yeah?)

She's the first that I know of who considers 'being in fashion' is a hobby. From the way I see it, it is more of an endless obsession without credit limit, bordering to being a hellish nightmare to any young man who wishes to become her husband. Maybe to a select few, her joy of shopping is a big turn-on, or a typical trait for the modern woman nowadays which can be tolerated given the sex is good; but for me, no thank you, big breasts will do. Fortunately, she has enough meat on her chest to fill up the biggest sweater from anyone's closet, and frankly, she looks just as sexy in a cheap sweater as a pricey one.

She wants to be the first in line when a fad starts. Not the kind of fad that took place in US colleges in the 1970s, of course, where frat boys rushed to fill a phone booth with as many people as they can get or a Volkswagen or a taxicab or a school bus or an elevator or a toilet stall, or the more recent one started in Minneapolis-Saint Paul a few months ago, not that either, where a flash mob casually gathers in a pre-designated spot determined via email and they act out a loose script such as mooing like a cow for two minutes or chant 'Death to Sweatshops!' to Starbucks or Toys R' Us or Macdonald's or GAP outlet stores.

She just wants to be in fashion.

Looking at her being the center of attention of her close friends, both male and female, I can't help but see how happy she is, her face lights up like a lighthouse by the sea. The other girls go crazy over the small things that she has on her, the items that she carry around, the details that no man would ever notice on a girl -- not that we don't care, it's just that we don't see how it changes her. The other guys, they just like to see her strolling down the hallway in her catwalk, like the supermodel that she is, and let her shake her stuff all the way to the classroom. Maybe that's the kind of compliment that she strives for; from the girls, she gets to be their l'ultima diva; from the guys, she gets to be the object of their desires.

The only thing that sticks into my eyes each time I see her is the shape of her, she is as similar as you can get to the shape of a cigarette. I guess she's pretty good at maintaining her matchstick figure, for I have not seen her in any other shape, never curvaceously chubbier nor anorexically thinner, for many years now. From the rear, she looks like she could use some raspberry jelly donuts and sugar-coated cinnamon rolls for breakfast to get that ass going. She doesn't look like she's comfortable sitting down on a wooden chair.

I can't quite put it through my head the fact that she wants the color of her hair to be the same to that of the cover her new fashion magazine; they must have put some kind of a very strong voodoo magic to the ink that prints the texts of that shampoo advertisement. I don't know. Maybe it was the doing of that TV commercial, where the girl in the gym was washing her hair down using the brand name shampoo and with each scrub, she loudly moaned and violently grunted, mimicking the sounds of a female orgasm.

If she tells you that two is one, then two is one, my love. If she tells you that you should know, then you should know. There is no point in arguing with a girl in fashion, you really would not want to put up a fight.

I assume she is yet to realize that all of those expensive, glamorous clothes that she decorates herself into, and all of those layers of makeup, moisturizer, toner and lotion that she paints herself with, and all the glitz, are to get the attention of a man who would love her just as much as when she is buck naked.


If She Puts Effort into How She Looks, Then It is Okay to Stare

I had a dream and you were in it, but I was poorly dressed, so you didn't notice me.


Smoking Girls Make Irresponsible Mothers

My mother says that girls who smoke are perempuan sundal. My grandfather calls them jalang, but he also calls girls who wear tight clothes in the city by the same name, so I guess he must have meant it a different kind of jalang. My grandmother calls these smoking girls something else in Jawa, which I do not know its equivalent meaning in English or in Malay, but from the way she says it and the horrifying face that she puts on when she says it, I get the idea that it is not a good name. My father once warned me not to get too friendly with girls who smoke, he threatened to pinch my scrotum if I ever did and I think he was serious about it, pinching the scrotum I mean; because he thinks they are of a bad influence to me. One of the surviving sisters to my grandmother, who lives in Sabak Bernam when I visited her a few years back during hari raya, she calls them filthy whores, because in the old days, only whores would smoke. I personally think that girls who smoke are sexy and stylish, but they would make irresponsible mothers.

She huffs and she puffs and she blows her lungs down.

The image is clear: only cool people smoke. The rest of us who do not, we get cancer from the smoke of those cool people who do, for that is the price. But we don't complain, because even with the dire health threat of secondhand smoke, we still think that those who smoke are cool, because, well, they are. The last time I checked, Humphrey Bogart is still cool, and he smoked to his death in 1957. When you see a girl reaching for a cigarette box from the deep corner of her handbag, there is a sudden rush in your blood to get up and smile and offer her a light to the cigarette at her red lips. It's a pleasure to be a gentleman.

She huffs and she puffs and she burns her throat out.

After a good, full dinner at the kitchen table, as she waits for the food to settle down to the bottom of her stomach, she sits leisurely on the picnic chair at the balcony of her apartment, looking outward into the cool breeze of the night and at the dark sky above painted with spots of stars and strokes of comets, and she lights up a cigarette that she has been holding between her index and her middle fingers, and she pulls off a full wet puff of virgin smoke into her lungs and she holds it there, and she absorbs its nectar as much as she can before finally releasing it, and in her eyes, a thousand-yard stare of nicotine cloud nine.

She huffs and she puffs and she poisons her eggs up.

After a good, robust masturbation on the living room carpet, as she waits for the full-body vibrations to settle down from the orgasmic twitching of her calf muscles, she lies tensed on her bare back with her legs spread and one arm resting on her warm forehead, her blood precipitates down from its boiling point, recuperating from the bliss of self-love, and she tops off the night with a quick light of the cigarette, and she pulls off a moist mouthful of virgin smoke into her lungs and she holds it there, and she savors its flavors for as long as she can before slowly letting it go, and in her eyes, the passion of a thousand men.

She huffs and she puffs and she kills her baby inside.

Gently, I moved her hand away from my chest, putting it down slowly next to her, hoping that she is not disturbed from her sleep. As quiet as I could, I rose up and reached for my khaki pants on the floor next to the bed. Her spring mattress creaked with every clutch of my muscle, and loudly at that too, and with great difficulty did I put my clothes back on, piece by piece, but she continued on in her deep slumber, sometimes moaning and sighing much to my surprise that maybe she was awakened by the rustling sounds of my clothes. But she did not, and she rolled over onto my side of the bed, unknowing that I was leaving her for good this time; she makes a good lover but I would want her for the mother of my children.


Untitled #3

It took him years of deliberation to formulate the model of a dream wife:
  She who can cook;
  She who can massage;
  And she who can cut his hair.

It is said that to get to a man's heart is through his stomach. What good is a beautiful woman who has no business in the heart of the house, the kitchen as her throne, she should be able to conjure up magic and lavish the starving lovers of food, the husband and the young'ens, with a spread of delicacies that rival her beauty as a woman and a mother. To chain the heart of a man that she calls her lover, to let him not wander into the embrace of another woman at night, to ensure the return of him from the punishing chores of the day, she nourishes him her poison for breakfast and she serves him her antidote for supper.

"What have you feed me with, woman, for now I love you more?"

The passionate touch of her hands onto the hard skin of his back, and she sculptures the flame of his passion into the likeness that she desires; the gentle scrubbing of her fingers onto the coarse shell of his skull, and she waltzes into the gate of his heart like a princess in a gown; through the spaces between the cage bones of his ribs, and she seals the padlock that locks down his temper; with each gust of breath coming from his chest, and she listens to the pleasure of what's to come. The woman who eases the pain of her man, the woman who comforts the sleep of a tired man, how could she not be the one?

"What have you done to me, woman, for now I crave your touch?"

He just thinks that it is the most romantic scene: when the husband and the wife are in their mid-30's, under the intense heat of a working-week Saturday, as the children are watching the morning cartoons in the living room, the couple lounges on the cement steps of their opened kitchen door, facing towards the green grass backyard of their 4-bedroom bungalow and the small plot of vegetable garden that she tries to grow, curry leaves, eggplants, lemongrass, and tomatoes, and in one hand, she has the scissors that she also use to cut dried chilies, and in another, she pinches a lock of her husband's hair between the comb and her thumb, and she snips, and she snips until he grabs her by the wrist, and he turns over:

"What have you against me, woman, for now I look butchered?"

At first she will be startled, but then she slowly smiles, and he'll say: "Save the sideburns."


Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits

The newlyweds, since they moved into the apartment, can't be kept apart from each other.
   He longs to nibble her ears, and do as bunnies do;
   And she rapidly becomes rabid, and sings little rabbit songs;
     Until they pass out.
     (A slow Saturday afternoon fuck).
Single friends no longer invite them to parties and gatherings.