Dead Pig Collector (Kindle Single) Read Online Free

and there was a pattering rainy noise as blood struck the underside of the plastic sheet—“but, happily, I do not have to.”
    “It’s a transaction,” Amanda said. “No emotional content.”
    “No emotional content is required. I’m a dead pig collector.”
    Amanda leaned forward, spotting new information. “I don’t understand that reference.”
    Mister Sun stood, unkinking his shoulders and back, taking stock of the liquid in the bath. He approved of that useful slight incline in the tub’s surface, helping the blood run down toward the plughole. It was almost impossible to manually pump all the blood out of a corpse. There always somehow seemed to be a pint left in there. But he’d certainly processed out the lion’s share, and, given the unexpected situation he found himself in, he probably had more time to play with than usual. He went to get the bottles of bleach from the bottom of the messenger bag, nestled there around the small roll of heavy-gauge garbage sacks.
    Amanda uncapped the green can and gave a few blasts of something synthetic and cloying into the air. “These things fascinate me,” she said. “It’s like what you’d get if you tried to describe spring to a robot. Not remotely authentic but somehow true. What’s a dead pig collector?”
    Mister Sun poured one bottle of bleach through the left-hand hole in the plastic sheet. “China,” he said, “is a place rife with pollution and disease. It’s not
just
that, but that is certainly a part of the landscape. It’s also a place of pig farming. And a part of pig farming—”
    The bottle was empty. He stood it by the bath and opened the second bottle. In it went, through the second hole. “There are periods—we’re in one right now, in fact—where serious disease and pollution events will kill the pigs. They will wash up on riversides in their tens of thousands. They will litter fields and pile up in their pens. A small farm—and, in places like Shanghai, they’re
all
small farms—cannot spend whatlittle time they have disposing of tons of dead pigs instead of maintaining their remaining assets.”
    The second bottle was empty. Mister Sun swiftly cut five small sections of duct-tape and fixed them around the edge of one of the reserved plastic-sheet discs. The disc was therefore stuck back on the sheet, closing the left hole.
    “The farmers could,” he said, “just sell the infected dead pigs into the food market. But, of course, people get sick. Sometimes they die. The food supply is always on the edge of triggering a pandemic. So it’s illegal. People get sentenced to life imprisonment for selling contaminated pig meat. You can draw your own conclusions about the life expectancy in a Chinese prison.”
    The second disc fixed on, Mister Sun busied himself with lightly tacking the sheet around the bath with a few more short sections of tape. “So,” he said, “there are people who have learned how to effectively and safely dispose of swine carcasses. If you have a stack of dead pigs, and you don’t want to go to prison, then you pay for a dead pig collector.”
    Mister Sun pulled off his gloves and delicately pushed them into one of the empty bleach bottles. Twisting on the cap, he then went to his toolbox, tugged out another pair of gloves, and snapped them on. He looked at Amanda, and gave her an uncertain smile.
    “Is something wrong?” she asked.
    “Not as such. It’s just that this is an unusual situation, and I’m not sure if it’s correct to ask for a cup of coffee while the blood breaks down.”
    “You shouldn’t tell me too much about yourself,” said Mister Sun, sitting with a handmade espresso that had been produced by a strange device whose shape suggested nothing but two cubes fucking. He had watched Amanda get lost in methodicallyselecting, weighing, and grinding the coffee beans, tamping the ground coffee and hand-pumping the espresso out of the device with extraordinary focus and vigilance.
    “In