Part One:
Part Two:
Part Three:
Part Four:
With police on the streets, peace had been restored, but the strays had gone to ground. Nobody could say where they were hiding but over the next four days I failed to capture a single one on film, except for blurry shots of tails whipping out of sight around corners. My chances of making the cover of National Geographic were dwindling.
I even went back over the dudebro photos, wondering if I could pass them off as the genuine article. If I could get some of them to pose in rags… maybe look downtrodden… would anyone know?
Then, at last, I found one. She was perched on a stool outside a bar, her limp tail poking out the back of her scant denim shorts. With her limited English and local accent, she didn’t certainly sound like a re-embodied tourist, plus she was adopting a number of exaggerated feline poses, licking the back of her hand and preening her ears, and meowing at passers-by, which was more conclusive catlike behaviour than anything I'd seen from the clones so far.
“Do you mind if I take your photo?” I asked. She frowned at that and jabbed a finger at the menu over the bar. It showed a list of overpriced cocktails. Next to it was a second menu:
Headpat - $1
Lapsit - $8
Massage - $15
Mouthfun - $35
Evidently she wanted a drink buying, but once that arrived she became quite happy to pose for the camera. Too happy actually, leaping up onto the stool and thrusting her pert ass in the air for the camera, and bending herself into a variety of lurid poses to lick herself.
“Please, you don’t have to pose,” I kept repeating. “It’s naturalistic photography. Please, just act natural.”
It was as she stretched one slender leg into the air and bent down to lick her thigh like a preening cat, that I noticed two things - the surgically-straight pink scar at the top of her tail where it met her spine, and the bulge of her dick tenting the front of the shorts.
It made no sense. Why would you produce a tail-less clone just to graft a tail onto it?
“Are you not a clone?” I asked.
"Same same but different," she replied with a shrugh.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
“I can be whatever you want, baby.”
I looked up at the neon sign over the go-go bar entrance. Soi Catboy Bar - Bangkok Premier #1 Ladyboy Kitten Club. I stared deeper into the smokey darkness of the bar, where half-naked, narrow-hipped catgirls gyrated around poles.
“You're a human, aren't you?” I groaned. “Ma’am, please get your leg out of your mouth and answer me.”
A sharp yank on her grafted tail was sufficient to make her sit-up straight and stop licking herself. She sulked, but another drink was enough to coax the truth out.
“Men don’t want ladyboys anymore,” she explained. “They want animals. So I become like animal.”
She gestured to her feline ears. For the first time I noticed they neither moved nor twitch. She parted the peroxide-bleached hair around them. There wasn’t even an ear canal, just flat scalp, cartilage implants.
"You turned yourself into one of them? For money? That's horrific."
“Men pay twice what they pay for a human," she shrugged, smoothing her hair back down. "I’m no stranger to surgeries."
I sighed, pulled out my wallet, and pushed money over for the drinks. “Thanks for your time.”
As I pushed my chair back, my eyes caught the menu of ladycatboy services. My hand paused in stuffing the wallet back into my shorts. She was already posing for more customers on the street by the time I turned back.
“How much would it cost to have you dress up in rags and roll around in the dirt pretending to be a subhuman?”
“Twenty dollars,” she replied without a moment’s thought. “Eighteen dollars if you supply the rags.”