On a nomadic slice of Rawai Beach 14-year-old Ning is arguing with her mother in their shack home that also serves as a restaurant. She's extolling virtues upon the next throb she plans to run off with, why he's different from all the others. The new guy, Ning says, doesn't care that she's occasionally a prostitute.
Her mother laughs and rotates her dense torso away. She seems to float atop her tree-trunk thighs. She eats sticky rice and every time she bends her neck a bit more of the mural tattoo on her back is revealed. She lords over the space like a Hun as twitchy young men arrive on motorbikes to deliver bags of ice and cases of water. She doesn't move from her seat and directs them with curt, barked commands.
Ning looks up from her phone, thumbs frozen mid-text, and stares blankly at the boys. They don't reveal their eyes. She speaks louder about her farang prince, hoping to provoke a glance.
Her mother counts money and laughs.
Her first English was "Bingo Was His Name-O". Her uncle Bing showed her her first brown cock.
Young prostitutes shop in groups in well lit stalls, hanging off each other like spider monkeys dressed in faux leather shorts. Ning has perfected seduction through simple fashion options and repetition. Her tricks are not the pioneers they believe themselves to be. They land on the island of youth to find that it has already been invaded. Yet they march through the salivating packs with machetes primed to slaughter tonight's Golden Ox, who's one visible eye is iced over with fear. They try to take pleasure in the thrusts, and she turns her head because she knows they will weep if they see her eyes.
A blown out pocket. A freshly abandoned nest. Her workmanlike demeanor is challenged by dimples and baby fat. Defiant cures for held over trauma.
She watches a cat swallow mosquito eggs out of a potted plant filled with stagnant water.
Feral cats and dogs practice incest and eat their young outside of Ning's home. Her mother has boiled a few.
When Ning is seventeen she realizes that all the men are the same. Her farang prince doesn't exist. She still falls in love once a week.
Her mother and brother die in motorbike accident. She learns this via text just before sucking a sweaty Indian dick in a Patong bathroom.
Ning inherits the restaurant and immediately sells it for $200 USD.
She burns incense at a roadside shrine on her way to Bangla road to pole dance. Her palms sweat profusely over the pole as an Australian octogenarian stares at her with hungry, bloated-red eyes.
She develops a terrible itch, accompanied by unyielding rot odor. She is bitten by a feral dog while sleeping on the street. The dog does not have rabies, it wants to eat her because she smells like food.
She has seven teeth left, these days.
At 22
She wishes the mountain was a volcano
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