Date: June 28th, 2009 11:43 PM

Author: To be fair (Semi-Retired)

To be fair,

PART I:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been transformed into an Asian man. He lay on his dingy unwashed Hello Kitty sheets and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his tiny, emaciated yellow figure stretched out before him. His frail hairless legs, pitifully thin even compared to the rest of his boyish body, splayed out comically before his tiny nearsighted sliteyes like a splintered bamboo chopstick.

"What's happened to me," he thought. It was no dream. His room lay quietly between the four well-known walls. And above the table, on which a wide assortment of empty Smirnoff bottles had stood just the night before - when Samsa was still a successful ibanker - hung the picture of a familiar woman. It was a gorgeous Russian girl with a fur hat and a fur boa. She sat erect there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm had disappeared, just as he had often disappeared into her muff after a night of heavy boozing. Yet this picture of Svetlana was not his; for this had been poorly cut out of an old Sports Illustrated issue, and was perilously attached to the greasy wall with a potent mix of dried semen, duct tape and profound desperation. And in the place of his hard earned bottle battalion there now stood an curious assortment of thick, strange tomes bearing odd titles - "Criminal Procedure", "Administrative Law", "Secured Transactions" and "TROL Spring 2009" - alongside three gently humming computers, all myseriously logged on to the same website. He immediately knew that he would never have the beautiful woman in the picture again.

"Oh God," he thought. At that moment he felt a slight itching beneath the shaggy black carpet that coated his oily scalp. He slowly pushed himself on his back closer to the bed post so that he could lift his unsightly bulbous head up on his narrow pencil neck more easily, and found the itchy part, which rained down small white flakes as he scratched it; he did not know what to make of them.

He looked over at the alarm clock ticking away by the chest of drawers. "Good God!" he thought. It was half past six, and the hands were going quietly on. It was even past the half hour, already nearly quarter to. What should he do? Did he dare to face the world like this?

As he was thinking all this over in the greatest haste, without being able to make the decision to get out of bed, there was a cautious knock on the basement door by the head of the bed. "Teddy Chu-yu Huang," a sing-song voice called out, "Zao on, lice and shine now boy! You lazy boy!" Was it his mother...was he living at home again with his parents? Gregor was startled when he heard his voice answering. It was clearly and unmistakably his voice, but it was now markedly higher in pitch, marred by a grating Chinese accent which left the words grotesquely distorted so that one did not know if one had heard correctly. Gregor wanted to answer in detail and explain everything, but in these circumstances he confined himself to saying, "Xiexie mama. I get up, woi ai ni." Apparently satisfied, his mother shuffled off slowly on her tiny, exquisitely bound feet.

As a result of that short conversation, however, his father also became aware that his son was still at home, and already he was knocking on one side door, weakly but with his fist. "Te-ddy...Te-ddy!," he called out, "Ni shenti hao ma?" And, after a short while, he called out again in a whinier voice - "CHU-YU!" Gregor directed an answer as best he could: "I go baba, xiexie." He made an effort with the most careful articulation and inserted long pauses between the individual words. His father turned back to his breakfast. Gregor had no intention of opening the door, but rather congratulated himself on his precaution, acquired from years of sleeping around in his former life, of locking all doors during the night.

***

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=1861557&forum_id=2#19865895)

but a top 5 post of all time

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=1861557&forum_id=2#19963602)