generator short story 000

	Sokha’s face had shattered again. Where once her nose was now was an eye. Her lips sat at the edge of her cheek and her hair was going all directions. She looked as if she had fallen from her roof onto the hard concrete of her back terrace and broke into a thousand pieces. By the time she had come to this thought her face had shattered once more, this time even more completely, resulting in pieces of it being replaced by angular black holes. Her face having been wholly destroyed, Sokha turned from the now shattered window and faced her older brother, Amara, his gloved hand holding a rock much like the one which had smashed through the abandoned storefront window she had been staring at.
	“Let’s go. Jacques called. He has new tapes at the station.” mumbled Amara, dropping the rock and adjusting some of the strips of colourful polyester which adorned the sleeves long black leather overcoat, heavily modified with a lining of assorted fur scraps, sewn in to make the coat resemble a mongolian hunting coat, a sloppily sewn on hood made from some floral print cloth and further lined with fur, and impractically large square buttons etched to look like the kings and queens from playing cards, which Sokha thought looked like the Mandarin Squares that ancient Chinese scholars wore, according to her textbook.
	Amara and Sokha began to walk away from the part of the nameless street they were on which was populated by abandoned shops and fenced in lots towards the part of the street where the pavement gave out, yet the sidewalk began, and the cement block walls began to rise, concealing the private houses behind. Sokha looked up at the peaks of the rooftops peeking out over the walls, thinking that these are the sort of houses that people who drive nice cars with good paint jobs and watch pop shows from Nakhonluang and eat balut every day because they heard it was an aphrodisiac. The kind of houses owned by people who need those aphrodisiacs because their marriages are falling apart, to the point where she can’t even muster the strength to look him in the eyes, and he’s off in some other girl’s one room apartment dying for a chance to get out of the mess he’s gotten himself into and go back to the old days when his wife was so head-over-heels in love with him that she’d sometimes get dizzy, and his friends hadn’t moved off to Meuonghaim or some other city where the trains ran on time and there were good jobs instead of the dust which had been blowing over the steppe every other day during the summer, blanketing everything in dust. How he hated the dust! How Sokha hate the dust! The carpet in her bedroom was no longer pleasant to stand on barefoot, having been turned filthy and dusty thanks to the “fresh air” which blew in through the perpetually open window, stuck like that because the air conditioner had stopped working and father was too busy fixing the refrigerator and the computer to deal with it. What an awful burden to deal with in the summer months that had been. Though it was now the cool season and Sokha was wearing her army green jacket, probably an actual military jacket at one time, which was covered in great strips of striped patches halfway down to extend its length down to her knees, the dust still permeated the city and on windy days everybody had to wear masks so they wouldn’t inhale as much.
	Amara turned the corner, Sokha a few steps behind. Now on a street which miraculously had both pavement and a sidewalk, though only on one side of the road, and a mixture of houses behind wooden fences and three story tall apartment blocks which stretched along behind chain link fences. In the distance the short, sprawling structure that was the neighbourhood train station stood, hiding behind its square concrete pillars which supported sheets of painted plywood that were meant to form an overhang but which more often than not were lying on the ground because a bored schoolboy had thought it would be fun to knock them off by throwing heavy rocks to rock the unsecured pillars. It was probably a good two kilometres to the station along this street, crossing four busy intersections, the kind which always made Amara nervous since cars actually went on them and seldom stopped for pedestrians. If Sokha wasn’t there her older brother might have stood for up to half an hour at this sort of intersection, lost in thought when the street was clear to cross, and frustrated at its business when he was paying enough attention to see the dirty white sedans and trucks sloppily painted with blue spray paint that dribbled down onto their windshields. Only the fear of Sokha’s judgement at his inattentiveness or indecisiveness kept Amara focused on crossing the street like a normal human being.