A Buddha with the arrogance of Brando

Pu-Yi Lee, famed sculptor for the emperor, stood in front of a silent slab of marble, balancing his weight from one foot to the other.

"That fucking Won-Kar. He's a lazy son of a bitch who doesn't deserve an eyelash of the praise that's heaped upon him. The Emperor will have my head over this."

Pu-Yi shifted his weight to his other foot.

"Ah that wonderful Won-Kar. He's a talented actor who deserves to be placed on a jade pedestal at the center of the court. The Emperor has rightly requested that I forever immortalize the figure of the Buddha in the dramatic lines and form of the Middle Kingdom's greatest man."

Pu-Yi moved his weight back.

"That fucking Won-Kar-"

But before he could complete another round of mental abuse, Won-Kar walked into Pu-Yi's studio.

"What does it take for a guy to get some decent fried dumplings in this neighbourhood ?" Won-Kar walked into the middle of the studio. Pu-Yi was shocked by how obese he was.

"Did you get a chance to read the tale of the the Buddhist Monk and the Monkey?" Pu-Yi inquired with as much politeness as he could muster.

"Okay down to business then if that is your pleasure. No I did not read this story of how Buddhism was delivered by a Monk and a Kangaroo from... Australia ?"

"Buddhism came to our kingdom from India and it is a glorious philosophy that will one day become central to our society. Or at least this is the will of our Emperor. If you had read the holy text you would have realized that the Buddha has denied the illusions of this world. The Buddha is not a man who has more Chins than a census in the Southern provinces."

"Yes I'm rather large but as I was so busy performing in the role of the gangster Yow-Mie in our eastern provinces, I hadn't the time to shed any of this excess. You'll have to love me as I am. Now let's hurry this up, I've a dinner appointment in a couple of hours."

And that is the story of why the Buddha is portrayed as an obese man.

Happy Easter.

AND THE MAN WHO CHOPPED OFF HIS TOE

The rooftop drain pissed out a cold stream into the back alley. Droplets of rain shattered into smaller pieces on metal railings. Puddles on roofs filled with temporary circles large and small. Sam studied all of this from his couch by the window.

He was not complete. The earth had the sky and salt shakers had pepper shakers but he was not complete. Sam got up from the couch and headed towards the bathroom.

The faint sound of rain pittering and pattering made its way through the air vents into the bathroom.

He was not a complete human being. There was something that was missing. He had tried to explain this so many times to people who simply looked at him in disbelief. One girlfriend of a friend had laughed out loud when he told them what was missing. She laughed and laughed as her mouth chewed down on the word "baby toe". People didn't want to hear his stuttered attempts at explaining how the absence of something could make somebody complete.

He clipped his baby toenail and the fraction of nail flew up and down into the toilet bowl. For some reason this brought to mind a camera and Sam pondered whether a photo would be too morbid or not. Too morbid.

Sam placed his toe on the cutting board inside the tub and brought the cleaver down with the weight of his body. With his annoying little baby toe out of the picture, Sam would be a new man. An emptiness on the edge of his foot was what he craved his whole life.

The sound of rain faded into nothing.

The Cutest Little Toenail Clipping

The cutest little toenail clipping flew through the air faster than she had ever flown after being chopped away from her home.

"What a glorious view of the world," she thought in her tiny little toenail clipping way. "I wish I had a camera."

She splashed into a huge lake of porcelain at the bottom of a white bowl. "Oh I don't know how to swim and there's a strange grave-like silence in here"

High above the toenail clipping a hand was coming down on the toilet handle putting an end to that funny feeling deep in the toe-nail clipping's soul.

thieving in your sleep

The door opened silently to a black quilt covering the dips and rises of a sleeper. The miniature mountain range on the bed fit in perfectly with the prints of Yosemite National Park adorning all four walls and every square inch of the room. Books on mountains were piled high on the bookshelves.

"No shouting from mountain peaks. Shrink mountains to the size of record grooves. Hear what they want to say. I wanna hear what they want to sing. Mountains never piss themselves." These mumbled words came from the depths of the mountain and the intruder froze in the door frame.

After our sleeper awoke to find all his valuables stolen, he hit rock bottom and finally made the decision to go into counseling for his obsessions. Ten years later, he made a breakthrough, unlocking the hermetic moments of his troubled childhood. With a profound understanding of what was travelling beneath the surface of his life, he recognized his pysche one afternoon in the central character of a best-seller. After a series of police investigations, it was revealed that the novelist was a retired cat-burglar whose past exploits turned up on various pages of his book.

Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" was used by the prosecution.

You had to be there.

Freud.

seasonal sex changes

Sam tossed his sweat-soaked t-shirt into the laundry hamper, while Leanne continued lecturing him on the finer points of domestic living.

"See, there's a perfect example of just making more work for yourself," she said, pointing her slightly bent finger at the sweaty shirt draped over the hamper. "That shirt will get buried beneath more clothes and it will... fester and believe me it's hard to wash "fester" out."

Sam listened while mentally tossing coins over whether or not he should confess everything to Leanne. They'd been living together through better and worse for two years but Sam had kept a part of himself secret through all of this.

"And I don't mean this in a bad way but if you weren't such a... slob, you'd find things a lot faster," she said and took a swig from her glass of red wine.

Sam felt heat rising to his cheeks "Well... and I don't mean this in a bad way but I weren't living with such a bitch, I'm sure I wouldn't be racing out of here all the time."

For the first time in what felt like forever he stopped dead in his tracks in the middle of their living room.

"I'm going to see Doctor Thales about gender reassignment surgery." And it was out.

"When ?" she said with red wine on her teeth.

"As soon as possible."

"Well I've got an appointment to see the good Doctor tomorrow morning about something myself."

"Tell someone who cares," Sam said, making several steps to leave the room.

"You see I'm getting a sex change too."

Sam stopped dead once again.

"Yeah, I'm going to become a man for the winter. When spring rolls around I will go back to being a woman. I just feel more male in the winter and more female in the summer. This is something I've always kept hidden from you. I know it all sounds crazy but I've been researching this for the last couple of months and they've made incredible advances in this field of surgery and it can be done no problemo. I belong to a group on the internet of others who share my seasonally gendered orientation." She put her empty glass on the coffee table. "I'm sorry it hasn't been fair to you to keep this hidden. I just sent emails to everyone we know announcing my decision. "

"Congradulations," Sam said with a forced smile, thinking to himself: always one step ahead, always one fucking step ahead.

the dumpster deep throating a rainbow

Whenever Sam - the age-old custodian at Pearson Senior Secondary - wiped the windows of the classrooms he imagined himself waving good-bye to all the kids along with their entire world of education. Whenever he wiped the windows after having a few swigs of whiskey that is.

"Yeah well it wasn't bound to last forever was it ? What with t.v., the internet and video games teaching you kids all you need to know," he muttered under his boozy breath. His right arm went up and down with a cloth in mockery of a real wave.

"Oh good luck with your future of flying space-ships or just skate-boarding down here on good old earth. Why the hell not ? Everything will be done by robots or cheap foreign labour anyway." Sam belched a blotch of condensation onto the window.

The outline of Principle Karlson appeared at the back of the classroom.

"Sam, we.. have to talk...about...." They had maintained a strong friendship over dirty jokes and crystal-clear confessions for 32 years.

What they both saw through the window that second did little to lesson the tension of what had to be done, but in the upcoming years it became a colorful detail that allowed them to keep their friendship. They could share a couple chuckles over what illustrated their story.

HANDS HELD AT RELIGIOUS ANGLES

Tiny deposits of magic were contained in the tears of fairies and it was for this reason that any single zone bus transfer blessed by those tears would be transformed into a multizone pass. That is of course if you believed in fairies.

Tony stood by the bus stop with his hands jammed in his pockets. Apart from pimples and the blood coursing through his veins, there were few differences between the lanky, blank-faced boy and the stop-sign itself. Loose change jingled in either his right or left pocket.

Hearing the strange sound of tinkling, Tony looked down at the base of his non-breathing doppleganger. A fairy was supping on the pedals of a buttercup. An idea brought some unattractive intelligence to Tony's face.

"Excuse me. Mightn't you have the time ?" he asked the fairy with clumsy formality.

"Three-thirty. I think the next bus should be by in an hour," she responded through a mouth full of yellow.

Tony wracked his brains for the language used in fables of fairies and other such nonsensical stories. "Is this not a day sky-heated to inspire perspiration from the pours ?"

"Uhhh, yeah I guess."

"What it is I mean to say is that the sun brings to mind my father for I am his son."

"Yeah."

"My father was divested of a huge sum of money... once upon a time. One afternoon while he was golfing, the beast that he rode upon across the greens bit a small man in the head. The man was cunning and claimed that he was vacationing from his vocation of the monkhood and that the head-chomp would delay his returnance to his monastery. In court this so-called monk held his hands up like in our classical paintings of saints or crossing guards. In short he walked away with my fathers fortunes."

"Weird."

"Oh but that I wish I were enabled to retain this change in my pocket. It would help my father back upon his feet, knees and upper torso."

"Um yeah... okay... well good luck with that," the fairy said as she wiped her yellowed mouth on her sleeve. "Just hang in there and hey I've got one piece of advice for ya."

As she floated away on her gossamer wings she gave him her middle fairy finger.