The Opiate, Summer Vol. 6
Lovers’ Rock Michael Tilley
T
he first thing to say is that I did not kill her. Believe me or not—you won’t be alone should you choose the latter—but this is the truth and has been confirmed as such by the authorities. “Accidental Death” reads the coroner’s report, courtesy of an act of God. Which is not to deny the suspiciousness of the circumstances surrounding last month’s tragedy. To wit: a twenty-six-year-old Vietnamese national, having arrived in the United States only the day before, is, despite dismal weather, ushered first to a desolate beach, and thence to a rain-slicked boulder far from shore, where, according to the testimony of the sole witness to the event, the widowered professor twice her age
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whom she has traveled here to marry without ever meeting in person, she is swept away suddenly by a so-called “sneaker wave,” her body yet to be recovered. Nor, mind you, should this citing of official exoneration be taken as a claim of total innocence. 1. Lust Let me be frank: I harbor what is commonly known as a fetish—a fetish, specifically, for Asian women. It has always been so. Indeed, even as far back as my earliest sexual stirrings, when the sight of most any female instantaneous-
