Of course.
The smile is the product, the display-front,
the first pitch—
perfected now to the decimal point
of maximum engagement.
The pig across her shoulders does not know.
That is the whole facade.
You do not tell the pig.
You only make it feel chosen.
The market does not sleep.
It cannot afford to.
Fluorescent bulbs flicker above wet stalls
in that particular frequency that lives just below headache,
and LED billboards cycle their virtual faces —
influencers who have never sweat, never smelled of frying oil,
never carried anything heavier than the curated weight
of self-exposure.
Tuesday is here for sale.
The dumplings. The data. The attention. The feeling of being seen
by someone who means it.
Especially that. Especially the feeling
of being seen
by someone who means it.
That is the most expensive item in the bazaar.
That is what the patient ones
are selling.
Sha zhu pan. Slaughter the pig.
But first —
and this is the genius, this is the cold
elegant brutality of it —
first you fatten.
You do not rush. Rushing is for amateurs,
for the crude ones who do not understand
that loneliness has a ripening time.
Time pleases, then fattens.
Wednesday. You send the message at the right hour —
late enough to feel intimate, early enough to feel considered.
You remember the small things:
the name of the dog, the city where childhood happened, the wound mentioned
once
but never followed up by anyone else.
You follow up.
The pig begins to glow with the specific warmth
of being known.
Oh to be seen!
But here is what the poem must not let you forget:
this is not only a story about fraud.
This is a story for the entire operating system —
the foundational logic that has migrated
from the criminal underground into the feed,
into the app, into the office, into the bedroom,
into the face you put on
before you open the door.
Everyone is fattening something. Everyone is running
some version of the long game —
the friendship maintained for its utility,
the vulnerability performed for the intimacy it purchases,
the attention given not as gift
but as investment,
patient, compound, waiting for the moment
the emotional weight is sufficient
like a fat savings account
for extraction.
We did not invent this in the digital age.
But the digital age gave it scale, gave it speed, gave it the infrastructure
of infinite reach and zero consequence,
gave it the smile that never tires,
The woman stands in the neon rain
and the pig is immaculate.
Fed on consistency. Fattened on the dopamine
of chosen-ness,
on the particular nutrition of feeling less alone
in a market this loud, this bright, this indifferent
to the individual heartbeat.
What did it cost her to become this?
That is the question the image will not answer.
That is the question the image is not
interested in.
Behind every perfect crime there is a supply chain —
a place where the smile was trained out of fear,
where patience was learned from someone
who practiced it on her first,
where the market logic entered early
and arranged the furniture of the self
around the transaction.
The scammer was once the pig.
This is not absolution. It is topology —
the shape of a world where the logic of extraction
moves through bodies like a current,
entering here, exiting there,
while the market hums and the notifications ping
and the billboards cycle their perfect faces
above the rain.
The most heavily rationed commodity is trust.
Not because it is rare. Because it is expensive
to produce
and cheap to counterfeit , and the market
cannot tell the difference
until the weight is right, and the moment comes
and the knife
is so sharp
you do not feel it, until after.
Thursday. She is still smiling.
The pig is still warm.
The fluorescents flicker in their low parasitic frequency
above the wet stalls of the world,
and somewhere a notification arrives —
and you look down,
and it is someone who remembered
the small thing you mentioned once,
and you feel it, the warmth,
the chosen-ness,
and you do not think
about the knife.
Nobody does.
That is the design.
That is the whole
terrible
design.
