Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor Read Free Book Online Page A

machete-cut greenery. Sometimes he thought he recalled other things—shells exploding in the distance, the silvery hulk of a jetliner—but he could never be sure whether these fragments were memory or dream.
    Because of a man his father had known in the American army, the family was able to settle in New Orleans without passing through the mud and concrete horror of the refugee camps. His birth name was Tran Vinh. When his parents enrolled him in American kindergarten, they reversed the order of his names so that the family name would come last, like an American child’s. And they elongated his first name to Vincent, which he hated and had never answered to, even at five. His family still called him Vinh. To everyone else he was Tran. In English, the short sharp syllable suggested movement (transmission, transpose) and the crossing of boundaries (transcontinental, tranquilize, transvestite), both of which he liked.
    Tonight Tran had swallowed acid and ecstasy until the lights and the video and the barrage of sound ran together in a gaudy candy-colored blur. At the rave there had been a smart bar where girls in green lamé whipped strange powders into allegedly IQ-raising concoctions that tasted better than Tang. There had been kids in full riot gear and flowered helmets, kids armed only with water bottles and baby pacifiers, kids who looked like Dr. Seuss characters on mushrooms. Which was no big surprise: they had all grown up with Dr. Seuss, and many of them
were
on mushrooms.
    Tran wore a loose knee-length dress covered with giddy loops of purple and red. He’d kept his shorts on underneath, so that when he got home he could tuck the dress into their waistband and it would look like a shirt, sort of. His eyes were smudged with greasy black liner, badly applied, which made him look even younger and slightly insane. He’d gone to the rave alone and had a wonderful time. These days, that was something to be proud of. He hadn’t been getting out much inthe past few months. When you knew you might run into someone you didn’t want to see, it was so easy to stay in your room reading, writing in your journal, listening to music, brooding over old love letters.
    He recalled an interesting bit of trivia he’d picked up somewhere: an old film star named Jayne Mansfield had died out here on Chef Menteur Highway. Her car had slammed into the back of one of the mosquito trucks that went steaming through the byways of the city, spraying enough poison to kill tens of thousands of insects. Tran imagined the famous decapitated head sailing through the cloud of insecticide and gasoline fumes, comet tail of blood describing a graceful arc.
    The image of the movie star’s death had haunted him since he’d first heard of it. He’d described it in one of his notebooks, in the purplest and most gleeful prose he could conjure. But if he tried to tell it to any of his friends—Vietnamese or Anglo—he knew exactly what they’d say.
You’re sick, Tran, you know that? You’re really fucked up.
    Now he was almost home. A tangle of factory smokestacks and towers loomed ahead on one side of the highway. A dimly lit cluster of buildings on the other side was the heart of the community where Tran had lived most of his life. The swampy green land surrounding these buildings, the ragged blue-gray shroud of mist, the slightly ramshackle aspect, and the Vietnamese characters on the signs suggested a tiny foreign village, but the whole thing was only about twenty minutes away from downtown New Orleans. Known as Versailles or Little Vietnam, the neighborhood had been established by North Vietnamese refugees, perpetuated by the family they brought over and the children they raised.
    He turned off Chef Menteur, navigated streets of little brick houses with poultry coops, fishing docks, vegetable gardens, and rice paddies in back. Eventually he pulled up in front of a house that had none of these