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Chapter 10723 wordsCompleted

Queen Kong narrates her obsessive love for a tiny human man she first sees sleeping in a skyscraper room on Manhattan. She describes staying in two quiet Village hotels, her fascination with pastrami on rye, and her initial encounter with the man as “love at first sight.” She watches him film a prize‑winning documentary, then leaves for New York. After he departs, she mourns, binge‑eats, and drinks river water until a red moon prompts her to retrieve him. She sails up the Hudson River one June night, prowls the dark streets of New York, and finally finds the man sleeping alone at 3 a.m. in his single bed, a blown‑up photograph of her above his head. She watches him, tears, and silently retreats through Central Park. The next day she purchases clothing and treats, then physically lifts the man from his room, dangling him between her fingers. She and the man spend twelve happy years together, sitting on the tip of the Empire State Building, saying farewell to the Brooklyn Bridge, yellow cabs, helicopters, and dragonflies. He sleeps in her fur, and she cares for him by massaging his eyes, blowing on him, scratching his back with her nails, and playing wooden pipes he made. When he eventually dies, she holds him all night, shakes him like a doll, licks his face, breast, soles, and his little rod. She then preserves his body, wearing it around her neck with tiny emeralds for eyes, proclaiming that no man has ever been loved more and that he may hear her roar even in death.

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Through chapter 10

Little Red-Cap meets a poetic, wine‑drinking wolf at the edge of the woods, follows him into his lair, loses her shoes, kills him with an axe, fills his belly with stones, discovers her grandmother’s bones, and escapes the forest alone with flowers. Three enigmatic queens gather at the palace gates, prophesy a new star and command a scar‑marked chief of staff to launch a ruthless eastward raid against every mother’s son. Mrs Midas recounts a night of chaotic intimacy with a gold‑obsessed lover, their volatile interactions in a domestic setting, and her eventual decision to leave him behind. Mrs Tiresias recounts a surreal tale of a man who returns home transformed into a woman, describing the gender swap, a menstrual curse, and a glamorous encounter with a lover at a glittering ball. Pilate’s Wife recounts watching the Nazarene enter Jerusalem, dreaming of his crucifixion, sending a warning, and later seeing him crowned with thorns and taken to the Place of Skulls; she doubts his divinity while Pilate is depicted washing his hands and believing he is God. Mrs Aesop confronts a pompous suitor, mocks his futile pursuits, and silences him with a brutal fable. Mrs Sisyphus is introduced, delivering a bitter monologue that likens her own loneliness to mythic figures while condemning Sisyphus’s endless toil with the stone. Mrs Faust recounts her marriage to Faust, their affluent nomadic lifestyle, Faust’s moral decline and demonic death, and her inheritance of his vast fortune after making a pact with Mephistopheles. Delilah encounters a scar‑wounded warrior, engages in a violent sexual encounter, then binds him to a door and cuts his hair. Queen Kong, a giant gorilla queen in Manhattan, obsessively pursues a small documentary filmmaker, lives with him for twelve years, then kills and preserves him as a necklace with emerald eyes.