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Boxer’s Omen: A Recitation
by Elytron Frass

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FIRST BARDO

It’s Summer in Wood Rat Year. Sai ya sat is abrew. In Hong Kong International Airport, a black sorcerer runs for the terminal, coveting the needed natal data to cast his deadly spell. Category III flickers over the entire screen. He checks his six. He’s been tracked by an orange robed xian. The xian flashes him blind with Suraya mudra. Now he’s boiling to burst and sickly expressing a nuclear hue, best described as glowstick green. He oozes and falls—a humanoid simplex of spiritual herpes. A widow-witch exits his now-lifeless mouth—his jaws stretch apart, wider than a Thai elephant’s birth canal. The xian flashes Apana Vayu mudra. The widow-witch falls. White hair and fingernails for days. A small bat exits her mouth. The xian collects it. Cosmic lingam drips fetid tears for the bat’s punctured chest as the xian holds it over his sme-ba, hammering his meteoric iron phurba into the vermin’s doomed heart. This galvanic incident triggers the pettiest supernatural war of attrition; the incunabula of it all.

SECOND BARDO

A Spirit of Halloween warehouse moonlights as an illegitimate Petsmart in which an evil wu mourns for the death of his former black magic student. A low poly hologram of the murdered bat’s skeleton pays him a visit. He bobs in the bargain bin for a corpulent rat. With his teeth, he eviscerates it and proceeds to hawk entrails and blood mist onto the skeletal representation. The bat fails to exact his revenge on the xian. He drains Listerine from a venomous snake’s tooth. He pulls out a skull from a bowl of nam pla and intestines. He arrives in the night at a golden pagoda. Within it he clings to the ceiling. From up in his crush velvet spell bag, he shakes out six furry windup arachnids. Tarantulas, made in Taiwan, swarm the xian and prick him to death through the eyelids. It has been prophesized that a glorious fighter would later avenge him. 

THIRD BARDO

Time is distended for ominous boxing. Two Muay Thai combatants jump kick the bruise-blood clean out from each other’s moist, cauliflowering features. Chan Hung watches from behind the white ropes of the ring as his brother rocks a formidable rival to rest. Lactic acid begins to release when his foot jab lands a pyrrhic victory. Chan Hung’s brother stands with his arms raised. The sore loser, stirring behind him, winds up the sneak-attack roundhouse that will soon sever the champion’s c-spine. Chan Hung vows revenge from the bleachers. An old monk appears in the flicker and smoke of a budget effect. He implores Chan Hung to seek higher levels of vengeance, but for the Buddhists and not for himself. Chan Hung walks in liminal of two distinct tiers of requital: in the realm of the psychical senses, he trains to extinguish the wu for the Buddhists; in the realm of immediate flesh, he trains to defeat his paralyzed brother’s sworn kickboxing rival. Occult oaths are emulsified in their celluloid representations: a psychedelic frenzy of colorized ritual witchcraft and violence.   

FOURTH BARDO

Chan Hung shaves his head and is robed in the golden pagoda by a cloister of orange-clad monks. Chan Hung slathers himself in a gallon of Vaseline and pops in his brother’s lucky sports mouthguard before stepping into the ring. Chan Hung meditates in a wintery river, bejeweled with black glistening leeches. Chan Hung spars in the ring with a vaporous mist in the air. Chan Hung is placed into an oversized lantern, encircled by rope-slinging monks, strobed in neon red swastika spirals. Chan Hung inhabits two places at once. He makes himself known to his nemeses. Through hard sex and kung fu and grotesque mystical questing, we are entreated by excess. It is here that cinema’s alchemy seemingly turns our own shock and repulsion into engagement and awe. But for what purpose? Upon reflection, there certainly is one…

FIFTH BARDO

Yet again, the wu swoops into the golden pagoda. He’s traveled there astrally; his corporeal form works remotely, doted on and attended by a small army of reanimated crocodile skulls. He bites the heads off two roosters to lubricate the efficacy of his hexes. A flock of rubber bats fly out from the fossas of those in his entourage. Chan Hung waves them away, oming to chopped and screwed ambient synth scores. The skulls of the crocodiles nip at his ankles. Chan Hung’s skin is a digital billboard of neon red Sanskrit. The wu paints his face red, yellow, and blue—an inexplicable likeness to the flag of Orkney. He invokes cosmic horror, materializing a gibberish-muttering demon. With its flimsy singular tentacle, glued together by slimes of some on-set animal’s sacrificed organs, the demon fails miserably to disrupt Chan Hung’s meditation. The wu’s two brothers have come to his aide. His siblings present him with decadent spreads of raw fish and poultry. They masticate and regurgitate eels into each other’s mustachioed mouths. A magical woman is born from their brotherly love rendered ageless by ritual suicide beside swaths of swapped sputum and vomited chow. She elongates a pair of cursed hairpins beyond reality’s veil, lusting to pierce Chan Hung’s eyes. She turns inside out, becoming a landscape for cellophane mummies conjured from semen and fulu.       

SIXTH BARDO

We watch on, adopting a speech of quick cuts and plot leaps. The kickboxer enters the ring. Chan Hung has been blinded by forces unseen. Chan Hung is swollen and steamed-lobster red. He bobs and weaves in and out of harm’s way like some miracle thing or a lucky buffoon. He’s about to tap out from exhaustion. A serendipitous timeout is summoned. Chan Hung degloves, scanning his face with his hands, as if braille. He locates the villainous hairpins jutting from each of his pupils. Once again unobstructed, Chan Hung can now vanquish his enemies. He punches through planes of existence. A versatile warrior; neither in spirit nor carcass; he boxes the space in between. The plot resolutions do what they must to satiate us, the gods we’ve become through observing such desperately earnest, delirious rites—bizarrely performed for our own entertainment. If such eye-candy is but an oblation, Boxer’s Omen aims with just that, to make us so drunk that we’ll never care to challenge its grotesque yet delicate logic. Thus, we can feast in our heaven as all remains right in this film’s little world.  

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Elytron Frass is the author of Liber Exuvia (gnome Books), VITIATORS (Expat Press), and a forthcoming novella-length experiment, entitled Moieties (tba). He remains largely anonymous and favors the outer peripheries of any likeminded circles. Links to his works can be found here: https://neutralspaces.co/elytron_frass/