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  • Lion City
  • Ng Yi-Sheng (bio)

On our third date, we went to the Zoo. “I’ll show you where we make the animals,” she slurred, still tipsy from the Carlsberg. It was three a.m., but she was the hottest thing I’d ever laid my eyes or hands on, so I said sure, why the hell not, let’s go.

We zipped down Mandai Road on her chili-red Yamaha motorbike, me tapping her helmet every five minutes to keep her awake, past walls and walls of choke-thick jungle: a mess of flame of the forest and jelutong. I hadn’t been to see the animals since primary school, so I’d forgotten about this bit of Singapore: a piece of wild left over from before the skyscrapers and bonsai gardens swallowed everything up.

We got to the alphabetized parking lot, slipped past the entryway, where all the tourist info desks and the orangutan-themed café lay dark and silent. Then we came to an iron door painted with zebra stripes. She waved her card at an RFID scanner and pulled me in.

“This is where the magic happens,” she whispered, sticking her tongue in my ear. And no joke, when I’m in her presence I think with my lower half every second on the clock, but the sight before me goggled my eyes so hard, sex was the last thing on my brain.

We were in a warehouse filled top to bottom with animals on shelves. Tigers and tapirs and tamarins, cheek by jowl, squatting still next to each other like so many library books. Life-sized beasts—and no toy-shop reproductions either: in the dark I could hear them breathing, yipping, whooping even, their jet-black eyes winking in the light of my Samsung screen.

She laughed at my slack-jawed stupor. “This never gets old,” she said, and ducked into the shadows, leaving me alone with the thousand-odd animals. Seconds later, she popped up again with a flashlight in her left hand and a something in her right.

“Look,” she said. Flanked by pillars of possums and penguins, the something wasn’t impressive: just a pawful of wire mesh, cable spaghetti and the like, silicon garbage, the city’s detritus. But then she tickled it under its chin—yes, it had a chin—and it stretched its arms and eyes, and yawned and nestled again, buzzing against her breasts, kittenish, puppylike.

“Lion cub.”

“Huh?” [End Page 58]

“I’ve been working on it these past three months. New design for infant lion. Release date’s confirmed: edition of six, just in time for Chinese New Year.”

She popped open her purse and pulled out these tiny fuzzy pajama onesies, clenched the flashlight in her teeth, and forced that wriggling little baby robo-cub in. And what do you know, with the bot in those clothes, it really looked like a genuine little Simba, whiskers and all.

“Skin,” she told me proudly. “Zoo’s finest achievement. Pulls the wool over their eyes. We could make a toaster look like a tarantula.”

“No shit.”

But her attention had drifted. “Here, hold this,” she said, and thrust the mewling cub into my hands. I fumbled and it bit me, but I stopped my curse halfway when I saw she was removing her shoes and her T-shirt, her jeans and her socks and her bra.

She clambered onto her workbench, her graceful arm clearing a space for us amidst the wires and screws, the flamingo feathers and fox fur.

“Come on up,” she grinned. “Let’s make some animals of our own.”

I’d met her the way everyone meets these days: on the Internet. She’d liked my profile, she said. It was no fun going out with a bad boy; her hobby was preying on decent, hardworking office types who actually took a bit of effort to corrupt.

Other things she liked included punk rock bands, graffiti art, the spicier varieties of Indian food, the most slapstick of Hong Kong kung fu comedies. Anything that was loud and joyous and verging on the borders of good taste.

“I didn’t have much...

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