Read Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat for Free Online

squeaking grub-like creature from beside the road one day. If not at death’s doorstep, it was, at least, in the front garden. She recognized a potential that none of us could see and took the bundle to Dr. Somboon, the livestock specialist. Dr. Somboon had set up his after-hours veterinary clinic, not because he was fond of domestic animals, in fact he found them most unpleasant, but because very few people took their ailing cows to a clinic in the evenings. And, of course, there was much more money to be made from pets. He’d put on rubber gloves before deigning to touch Mair’s latest find. He obviously recognized the angel of death hovering over the pup because all he could prescribe was euthanasia. But Mair wasn’t having any of it. She ordered a cocktail of drugs for a menu of ailments and spent two weeks nursing the skin bag back to health. She kept it there in a basket under the counter of her shop repelling the few customers who chanced by. When chocolaty hair began to sprout, Mair named her Gogo: Thai pronunciation for Cocoa. Gogo had a stomach complaint that prevented her digesting her food. She ate more than me and shat like a buffalo. Her condition made her permanently menopausal. For reasons I could totally understand, she didn’t like me. I didn’t like her back.
    So, by the eighth month of our southern incarceration, Mair had already launched a new generation of offspring which she regaled with the same love she’d afforded her children. Me and Arny were starting to hope that our services would no longer be needed. Our rival siblings were sitting either side of Mair in front of her shop when I returned from the Internet café. Gogo turned her back when I arrived but it didn’t faze me. I was in a good mood. I’d sent my story to three newspapers and the photos had been snapped up by 191. Thai Rat and the Mail wanted follow-up stories as soon as possible. I could see an end to the dark tunnel of selling empty bottles and used newspapers to the recycling truck. It was humiliating having to queue up there with our garbage. It was just one of the growing number of things I didn’t like about our life. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful for the opportunity to move to the backwoods marshes of Maprao but, purely for my own entertainment, I’d put together a list of my top unfavorite things about my new home.
1. Power cuts
2. The constant smell of drying squid
3. Neighbors with nothing intelligent to discuss
4. The thud of coconuts falling from trees in search of a head
5. A shallow sea so warm it breeds Jurassic life-forms
6. The drone of passing fishing boats at three a.m.
7. The close proximity of reptiles
8. No telephone line so no Internet
9. No nightlife (no daylife either)
10. Garbage from all the so-called high-class resorts being washed up on our beach.
    The original list ran to sixty items but I didn’t want to look like a bitch so I parsed it down.
    My household duties were laid out on a roster. The seafood invariably came to me, caught by neighbors along the bay upon which we lived. For vegetables, until I could convince the chickens to lay off my vegetable garden, I had to go to Pak Nam. Pak Nam, our nearest ‘town’ (sorry, I chuckled then), is ten kilometers from us over the Lang Suan river bridge. It’s such a dinky place it’s like driving a Humvee through LEGOland. One-man footpaths crowd in on you from both sides. Blind people on motorcycles and bicycles pop out of unseen side streets like computer game antagonists forcing you to swerve out of their way. Vendors push carts in front of you just for the fun of it. And Burmese, more Burmese than you can shake a cheroot at, all walking in the road as if they don’t have pavements in Burma: girls with ghostly powder-caked faces and boys with long checked tablecloths hanging from their waists. At last count there were two million of them loose in our country, all probably powdered and table-clothed and walking in the road.
    The heart of