The Stinking Corpse--by Kyi May Kaung

Novel excerpt from dream nightmare--by Kyi May Kaung--

Dr. Khine awoke from a daytime dream-nightmare with a stink like that of dead humans or animals in her nostrils.

At first she thought it might be her weekly garbage.

Since they started charging for plastic bags in Marietta Land about 2 to 3 years ago, Khine had now had to buy plastic trash bags, but she did not mind.

They were on the whole, more reliable than recycling plastic shopping bags, which she had done for the last 25 years in The Nation's Capital.

Those had seams and tended to leak at the edges and corners.

And also, she was the one who had suggested them after she went to a conference in Berlin in the New Unified Deutchland, and bought a disposable camera, and they had placed a camera, just a camera made of cardboard, on the counter and no plastic bag.

It was very different from Chimerique.

Now shops saved the environment at the same time as they earned tax rebates for bag fees.

Khine carefully kept her shopping cart lined with one big heavy duty black bag, and an extra bag folded in her handbag, just like the Poles with their little shotka in the old days.

The purpose-designed plastic trash bags worked much better, and usually did not leak onto the new carpet of the hallways, with their golden scroll design on a black background.

But they took time to fill, and now Khine would combine both her kitchen and her bathroom garbage before disposal down the chute--the problem was the kitchen trash tended to smell after three days, when the gallon bag was only half full.

Khine used odor neutralizer in a white generic bottle.  It seemed to work, but this time--

Khine awoke fully and found she was in the little house in an outlying Yangone suburb.

Yangone was called Yangone (End of Strife or Enemies) but enemies still grow on trees, so Khine called it Rangoon, it was a point of major strife with her.

She stepped out onto the narrow wooden 5 x 15 feet veranda in front, raised on 3 feet pillars of concrete and mosquito-netted.

A bleached-looking corpse, male, was hanging on the right side from the teak rafters by a coir rope twisted around its ankles.

So that was where the stink was emanating from.

Dr. Khine went inside, finally found her close-work glasses, put them on her nose when she was 12 inches from the corpse, wrinkled her nose, pushed her spectacles up nervously, and walked around it, carefully studying it without touching anything.

It had a terrible bluish white pallor and gravity and the anguish and pain of death had pulled everything towards its head.

Khine tilted her head and stared at the distorted features and the thick black hair.

She didn't recognize him, but she could not be sure.

The head was upside down and near her calf level.

She considered using a pencil to close its open eyes and mouth, but in the end she did not.

.  .  .
Athena, Ariadne the web weaver spider and Diana the Huntress, RadhaKrishna, simultaneously male and female entered her head simultaneously and started to talk and act up.

As Athena, she took up her spear, and slammed it down on the worn shardoe teak plants of the small veranda, so it stood there shivering, causing an earthquake in the whole of Berm.

She leaned her shield on the wire mesh on the front of the house, facing the street, so that everyone knew Athena herself had claimed this murder investigation, and she would brook no interference whatsoever.

Athena's owl flew outwards in ten directions simultaneously, and alighted on high teak trees, twisting its neck and looking and listening attentively.

Ariadne, in life the victim of Athena, who had been jealous of her weaving skills, started spewing white liquid from her mouth, the strongest natural fiber ever, and weaving nets all around the small house and the trees.

Sensitively waving in the breeze, the nets would detect any infringement, cyber, nuclear, telepathic, personal, sexual, mechanical.

Radha Krishna, a former Untouchable, who had gone to school in Prince Town, leaned against a tree outside of the network, and calmly considered how he would use both sides of himself, to talk to both genders and anything in between.

The earth shook some more, and all the elephants and the banyan trees cried, for they realized the murder victim was someone very important.

The cannon ball tree made some more cannon balls.

Excerpt from my pol sci fi series 2131
Copyright Kyi M. Kyi May Kaung10-13-2104