His faceted eyes are amber glass on an ivory face. But it is when the rush hour parts around him that his inhumanity becomes beyond dispute.Smiling he bares blunt shoeshine teeth and again asks, "What is it that you long for best, that clenches teeth and claws over the ventricles of your heart?"She ignores him, gazing out the window where the tunnel blurs by in a gray-black haze. Overhead, the indicator blinks green between one station marker and the next. Fortress Hill, Tin Hau. The man disappears before her stop. The crowd flows back into the space he left behind without ever acknowledging he was there.Afterward she does not remember what the man looks like and his words fade. This is the first strange thing she encounters that day.(Julienne does not count her aunts as strange. It would be rude, and they are the best relatives one could hope to have.)In the afternoon, having spent her half-day off in pursuit of a low-calorie lunch, Julienne goes to work. Sunlight around her neck noose-tight, she encounters the second strange thing: a woman bleeding under the clock tower.
