amongst those leading lives of quiet desperation...

..found myself seated in a cool shadowy room with muted gong music playing and a Thai woman washing my feet. She called herself Sky, because her name (she said) was too hard for me to say. I was so moved by the foot-washing I wanted to weep. Then she had me on the table and was kneeling on the backs of my thighs and tugging the kinks out of my arms. They were sore from rocking up and down Myanmar on the ghost trains. She poked her elbows into the small of my back and did a sort of samba along my spine, digging her toes into my vertebrae, and i thought of my trip from Colombo to Galle. She punched my upper back, rubbing her knuckles in the recesses of my muscles, and i thought of the two drunks on the train from Bokhara, their hands in the remains of the torn-apart chicken, their eyes glazed with vodka, as i stayed in the corridor trying to remain upright. She worked on my arms, flexed on then the other, twisted them, and i saw the rigid posture of the Muslim sitting stiff-backed on the train from Ashgabat to Mary.
She straddled me, as though playing horsey. This was heaven, having her seated on my back like a child on a pony ride, her knees forward, using them to massage my kidneys as she hammered the kinks out of my back. I had seen horsemen sitting like this in the desolate fields of Romania, but i was the pony now, and she the rider.
She slipped back, gripped my legs with hers and pressed, a wrestling move, kneeding my calves with her heels, and then she took hold of my feet, finding each joint, each muscle, rolling each toe - whose feet are ever venerated and squeezed and chafed in this way, even by a lover! I had a vision of all the people, in India and Sri Lanka and Myanmar whom I had seen walking - their cracked and tortured feet in broken shoes and shattered sandals.
'Over, please.'
Then I was face-up, with a cloth mask over my eyes, as Sky knuckled and punched my legs and made a circular syncopation, open-handed against my inner thighs, playing a percussive tune. All this for almost two hours, a kind of bliss, some of it hurting badly, but when she stopped I wanted more. What lover has ever spent that much time appeasing the tension in her lover's body?...

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
Paul Theroux





..it occurs to me that of all the women since Carmen, there isn't one with whom sex is as addictively delicious as it is with Rose. Rose and Dan is total fucking, coitus mechanicus,contours that fit together like a well-oiled machine....
And then the anatomy. Every nook, every fold inside her beats with every vein, every curve and engorgement of my stiff prick. It's like she's specially cast for me....

Ray Kluun
The Widower



Truly I can find in her everything I might ever want. But I always want to be away from her. My world is a wound-up clock but i don't know who it was that wound it. Maybe this is what fate is. Sometimes this clock of mine points towards Hong and sometimes it points somewhere else. Sometimes it points towards the city; sometimes it points toward a village in the English countryside. Sometimes it points towards the eighty-eight-story Grand Hyatt Hotel; sometimes it points at at a patch of flat ground. I'm exceptionally gutless. I often have to get away from the people i'm closest to, and i'll go off by myself to someplace I've never been before, and then i'll come back. This way, life is always fresh for me, because i know that there's always something new just waiting to be discovered. It's like gliding away, and for me it seems to be the answer to everything. Whenever I leave, I feel so real, and everytime i come back I feel as though i've lost something.

Mian Mian
Candy