Strange Mammals by Jason Erik Lundberg Page B

air arabesqued across the threshold and caressed the flesh on Moss’s bare arms, stirring the hairs to stiffening and the skin to pebbling. Moss shivered, hugged himself, and stepped inside.
    There was something intensely familiar about this place, but just as with the harsh deliberately hurtful sentence that even now, possibly months or even years after it had been uttered, brought a rush of blood to his cheeks and his ears and the back of his neck, the entryway in which he now stood would not reveal itself fully through his haze of past experience. It measured only three paces by seven (again, three and seven, again and always), the floor faced with iridescent white marble tiles that caught the light from the warm LED lamps recessed into the ceiling and produced a liquid shifting of pale hues that slid over the marble as he moved his eyes or head or in any other way adjusted his perspective. The interior walls: concrete, like all the walls in this housing block, painted a faded blue-grey. On the far end sat a tall mahogany altar, a porcelain statue of Manjusri at the place of honor, two handspans high even seated, with lit joss sticks planted in two sand-filled bowls in front of the deity, half ash themselves, drizzling upward curlicues of gentle whitish smoke.
    Moss removed both sandals and socks, placing them neatly by the door, shivering once again as soles and toes made contact with chilled marble, then stepped from the entryway into the living room proper, from marble to painted white hardwood. An unusual material to be found in the tropics, prone to warping in the oppressive humidity unless properly treated, although this flooring appeared to be constructed from bamboo instead, which, as a grass, tended to behave more than its arborial brothers. The room itself exuded a Zen minimalism, the furniture chosen for its rectilinear monochrome simplicity: three-seater sofa with thin cushions, reclined armchair constructed of a single piece of beechwood bent into the frame’s form, low glass coffee table with cylindrical teak base, corner shelving unit holding: blown glass sculpture, manually shaped figurines of elephants and horses, and the carved ivory Taoist trinity of Fu Lu Shou as a conduit to the gods of good fortune, prosperity, and longevity. Moss stepped up to stroke the bald grinning hypercephalic form of Shou, recalling the cramped Hong Kong shop in which he had bought the small statue, the aisles crammed with what seemed an infinite number of variations on figures from the Taoist, Hindu, and Buddhist pantheons, and how claustrophobic he had felt, hemmed in by rows of crass commercial divinity, biting his tongue to keep from yelling at April to just fucking choose something already so he could retreat to the darkened quiet of their womb-like hotel room—
    Wait.
    Wait.
    His arm dropped, as heavily and suddenly as though catching a fifty-pound weight, his fingers inadvertently pulling the god of longevity downward along their trajectory to spin end over end in a whirl of graceful somersaulting and then shatter upon impact with the bamboo floor into a hundred thousand shards of ceramic destruction, a reaction that progressed to an utter annihilation as the shards shivered themselves into grains, into powder, into dust, into individual atoms, into nothingness. The ringing sharpness of the statue’s breakage hung in the air for a long moment, imbuing the other items on the shelves, the walls, the floor, and Moss himself with inevitability and loss. It was only when the long moment ended and the dizzying tinnitus of his inner ears dissipated that another sound intruded into his perception: a moan—long, sustained, female, provoked unquestionably by lust.
    To his right, another dark brown door, identical to the first, the room beyond: the source of the aural ecstasy. As before, at physical contact with the spherical doorknob, the absolute chill crept upward from his fingertips, this time progressing all the way