But in this dream it had metamorphosed into a show called Les Biz, about business opportunities in the new me and martian nation. They had actually managed to draw in the famous actor who was in Les Miz, the one who played Inspector Javert.
Khine was very pleased with this. She was looking forward to the street-side open audition.
At this time the actor was already about 72. Khine looked down from her 36th floor apartment on 5th Avenue, and saw him singing on the pavement. She could not hear him very well, but she could see his long curly white hair, which reached to about his shoulders. He was wearing a rust colored suit, and even from so high up, she could tell he was very tall, about 7 feet.
But he did not stand straight, more like an arc or a backwards "C."
She was disappointed that he did not sing the whole aria, but only sung a fragment.
Then he went into the building.
The tractor trailer he came in was about 15 feet wide,
Its front opened down and 2 white poodles, slightly past their prime, came out. Then a whole lot of overstuffed pillows covered in different colored satins spilled out onto the sidewalk too.
*
In this scene Khine had apparently relinked up with the man who was the model for Carl Carpetbagger in Kaung's play Shaman.
She was all ready for the formal reception, except she could not decide between the jacket in a darker dusky pink than her pants, and the one that matched exactly. So she put on the darker one to see how it looked in the mirror. Carpetbagger's wife Sapai Sabal came bustling in. Khine thought the transliteration of her name was ridiculous. It reminded her of the word for cross-eyed,
"kutpai." And the woman really was a bit cross-eyed. Also her face seemed sunk in the middle, like a cashew nut.
Khine wished she did not have to associate with these people. Kutpai had once told her that as a child she had had an operation for fused plates in her skull, and afterwards needed a helmet to hold the plates in her head open.
Now she sometimes had crossed eyes when she looked closely at something, and Khine wondered if she was too old to have an operation to have it corrected.
Kutpai asked, "Have you eaten?" She pointed to a large bowl of salad put out on a side table, with the mirror behind it.
"Are you ready?"
"Well, almost."
Khine looked at the salad, which looked like a Cobb. A few pieces of bacon and bread cubes on a massive mound of lettuce, not her favorite vegetable.
She had already brushed her teeth, and so she just picked up one bread cube and munched on it. She looked in the mirror, and saw it was maybe a one way glass. She could see Carpetbagger in the meeting room next door, sitting with some mirama businessmen.
Khine wondered if it was really a one way glass or a two way glass. As far as she could remember, she had not changed last night into her nightgown in front of the mirror, and in any case like mirama women (most of them), she changed using her longyi or sarong as a wrap around her chest.
Except for the Water Princess with breasts like fried eggs, who for some unknown reason had hung her towel around her neck, she said because she forgot her yay lair longyi (bathrobe sarong) at home.
That was ridiculous, flashing those fried eggs.
Khine had since shared hotel rooms with stranger white women found for her by Roommates International, on solo trips, and even the white women faced the wall so that only their backs were revealed when they changed.
Khine could not figure out Fried Eggs. It was like this perhaps Jewish lesbian woman coming on to her in the bookstore, showing armpits full of black hair.
Khine could not understand it at all, and avoided those kinds of situations as much as possible.
Copyright KMKaung
from Les Biz Stories. Flash Fiction. 5-27-2015
Photo--lost doll--KMKaung
5-27-2015
