Thanks to submissions from many authors, poets, and artists, as well as the work of our editorial advisors and layout team, Volume 3 is now online. We hope you enjoy it. You may wish to click “View this document on Scribd” under the embedded PDF, because you’ll be able to zoom in using the plus sign for easier reading.
Remember, we’ll be posting work for Volume 4 as it’s accepted, so check back here often for more art and writing.
34 installed - Alfredo Salazar
Oedipus Loves Electra - Alfredo Salazar
Oedipus Loves Electra detail - Alfredo Salazar
I am all men as I am no man and therefore I am - Alfredo Salazar
He came to our school in a swirl of sequins and chiffon. I sat enthralled as he spun around the gymnasium floor like a god of twirling color. As he moved, I imagined myself as such a master, this prophet of entertainment plying his craft in front of fifty impressionable teens sitting in awe of his skill. I had never seen anyone move like that. His name was Graham Williams and he took my heart that afternoon one magnificent dance step at a time.
“I’d like you all to thank Mr. Williams for coming to Gramercy High School today,” Principal Johns said as Graham gave a magnificent bow and a flourish. We all clapped, and it was over.
El Musico - Frank Guerra
Williams was a local celebrity. He now ran a theater and dance class at the rec center on Parker Street, after a brief success on Broadway had run its course. Now he danced in purple sequined tights to Grand Funk tracks in our gymnasium. I didn’t care. I had found an idol.
Me and my best friend David Yow had a two-man dance crew of sorts and were looking for new moves to incorporate into our routine. We were inspired by wild tales disco troupes at glamorous parties, of Studio 54 and living life like we thought we ought to. Money, booze, drugs, we wanted it all and we figured dancing was our way into some sort of fame. We had practiced for weeks and in two days the school was hosting a talent show.
I had read about Graham’s showcase on a flyer in the cafeteria, though it took some convincing to get David interested. As usual, it took April McAdams to get him to do anything.
“She’s going?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She asked if you had plans or something.”
“I guess it couldn’t hurt,” he answered. “Does he do anything other than the hustle?”
Classical Plastique: Girl in a Field - Vera Barnett
April met us there. David and me were smoking cigarettes and leaning on the gym’s back wall looking as cool as we could. David was better at it. He was taller, muscular and had filled out around the time most boys do, while my body grew at a rate slower than a redwood’s. I was short and awkward and very aware of it.
“Hey fags,” she laughed as she walked up to us. “Got one for me?”
David pulled a smoke from behind his ear and handed it to her.
“This is going to be terrible. But better than algebra, I guess.” She shouldered me aside, leaned against David, and ran her fingers down his chest. “I’ll save you a seat,” she whispered in his ear before she sauntered off.
David ground his butt on the bottom of his shoe.
“Come on,” he said.
I followed, noticing the difference between his hips and April’s, the way hers swayed where his were solid and much more inviting. I watched as I trailed behind them.
After the show, me and David walked to my house.
“It was okay. The hands, the spins, we need more of that. But most of all,” David stopped and made his point with a finger in my chest, “no more of this Olivia Newton John shit. We need some real music.”
He wasn’t quite as impressed with Williams as I was, but he was starting to see what it might take to be famous.
I had designed most of the choreography for our routine. David mostly just cut what he thought didn’t work. That usually meant fewer feathers or outfit changes and less chances for anything that involved us touching hands. How we were supposed to spin and gaze into each others’ eyes without holding hands, I had no idea. So I concentrated on the steps.
We practiced in my basement. A dirty orange couch, a record player, and a full wall mirror were the only witness to our efforts.
“Three, four, and step and finish,” I panted as the track ended.
David was smiling and I knew he liked the steps I had added. He hopped over the back of the couch and sat cross-legged, pulling a bag out of his pocket. He laughed.
“Do you really think we have a shot?” He licked the paper and lit a match. “You’re pretty good at this, you know,” he said with a smile.
David looked brilliant. Still winded, he took a long drag and coughed it out. I sat next to him and took the joint from his hand. Our knees were touching and I leaned back and closed my eyes.
“We could be good together,” I said. “We make a good team.”
Angelita y Cato - Frank Guerra
“And move to LA, be actors or somebody so famous they have to make up a new name for what we are,” he laughed.
“We could be huge. Think of the money, the parties,” I agreed.
As I smiled I noticed that our hands were touching. I don’t know how mine got there, or for how long, and I looked at my fingers, wondering what they thought they were doing. David had stopped laughing and was staring at me. He pulled his hand away slowly. The only sound that got through to me was my heart pounding in my ears so I didn’t hear him the first time.
“I said I should get home,” he stood and put his things in his pockets.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, man,” he said.
School was long and painful the next day. Time passed slowly and David was nowhere that I could find him. I passed April in the hallway after lunch and she smiled at me. It wasn’t a nice smile.
“Good luck tomorrow,” she snorted as she passed me.
That night I practiced alone. David’s parents were tired of me calling and told me politely to find something better to do with my time.
I went to the basement and put the needle to my favorite record.
“Sing to me, Barbara,” I whispered.
It was harder to dance alone when you’re used to a partner but I practiced until my thighs burned.
I fell asleep on the couch that night. With a beer in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, I dreamed of David and of being a star.
The Heart - Cheyenne Dreiling
I walked to school alone. The talent show was in an hour and my stomach was in my throat. I walked into the school auditorium and asked where I was supposed to go. I was pointed backstage where the other performers were stretching and talking quietly. I found the place David and I had agreed to meet, and still there was no sign of him.
The auditorium grew silent as the first act began. The curtain rose and my breath caught.
There he was. He and April McAdams stood hand in hand on stage, heads bowed. She wore a white dress and he a white suit and tie. “Jungle Boogie” began, and they danced, with April moving her hips and tossing her hair as David twirled around her looking to all the world like John Travolta. He spun and stepped just like I had showed him. I was a beat ahead of them in my mind and my mouth moved unbidden to the lyrics. But they were good. Better than I was willing to admit. His hands gripped April’s waist and he lifted her in finale above a heaving chest and a triumphant grin.
That should have been me panting and smiling beside him basking in applause, I thought. But as it was, my number, our number, was scheduled next and I was alone.
I walked slowly on stage, I went to my place and I waited. I thought of Graham Williams and how he stood alone that day, fearless in bright sequins under a blinding spotlight. I held him in my mind and tried to steady my heart.
Graham would have been proud.
My music played and hesitantly I began to move. I was scared and lonely so I imagined my David like he was when we were together. I remembered him and I danced like there was someone next to me who cared for me. I performed each step and sway like he had been there all along. I remembered how his body felt against mine and I remembered the dreams we had once shared.
I forgot I was alone. I danced with David and I danced for David. Then again, I had always danced for him. I would never have the courage to tell him so, and he had chosen April over me. But I knew I had always loved him and I suppose when I got a bit too close, that’s when he finally realized it.
There were four of us on this jaunt in Japan. Angie and me, and the hula girl and the old soldier. It was a real east meets west thing, all of us crossing the long Pacific night, though the two of us had jetted from clam-frying Ipswich, Mass. and the two of them from somewhere desert-like and critter-crawling that sounded like a Mexican dish and was a coyote’s howl from San Diego. We all met by happenstance in Kyoto, did a few lunches of conveyor-belt sushi and decided to be travelers together for a few days when the official activities came to an end. Where we all fell in with each other for the very first time was the place the old soldier dubbed “flower headquarters,” making the hula girl and Angie chortle and give each other knowing glances, like sisters being silly. He said flower headquarters made him crack up because it was such a dumb-ass combo of a hard and soft word, just like “kitchen stadium” in the food network program featuring the so-called “iron chefs.”
Flower headquarters! In fact, this venue of horticulture was a surprisingly sleek and cool office building called Ikebana International, the focal point of the worldwide society of women (mostly) who do Japanese flower arranging and buy endless paraphernalia to assist them in their snipping and bunching: a vast array of precision tools and artful containers, all purchased from the association along with the lessons, etc.
Angie and the hula girl, whose real name was Christine, were members and official enrollees, occupying themselves dawn to dusk with classes taught by Japanese flower masters, and attending jam-packed exhibitions in a hall surrounded by a moat of swans. Me and the old soldier, real name Patrick, were the drag-along spouses, optional companions who were only there to partake of the discounted air fare and hotel rates and the legendary palate-challenging cuisine, which featured dishes such as boiled guts of slug.
But before they even got their certificates, before the four of us even climbed on the first bullet train, Christine gave us a taste of what culinary life was like back home with the old soldier. “He walks into the kitchen one day,” she told us, “holding this fat rattlesnake, and he expects me to cook it. So I ask him: ‘Where’d you get that?’ And he says: ‘In the backyard, where do you think?’
He tells me he killed it, and now it wouldn’t be right to waste it, and that I should go look at my chicken recipes. Well, I did and I cooked it. I looked the other way and dredged it in flower. But I made him skin the thing. What a mess! And I can tell you, it was loaded with bones.”
The old soldier got his way with the rattlesnake, bossing Christine around the kitchen, and he was the same way with us, bossing us around Japan. The first place we would go see was Hiroshima. There was no Plan B. He’d get this General Patton scowl on his face if we even mentioned anything else. So off we went.
The night before we left, Christine gave the Angie the lowdown on the old soldier, and she blabbed it right to me. He wasn’t even a soldier at all, he just had that look: John Wayne, Douglas MacArthur, the granite jaw, the 45-caliber eyeballs, that thing from the old newsreels and war movies. He was a military man in a way, but it was a crazy way. In his real job he was some kind of marketing man, he worked for a communications agency or something. But he was a nut for war collectibles, World War Two stuff always, although he wasn’t even born then. He sold them on eBay, but what he liked to do best was bring them to work. He filled up his office with them, floor to ceiling. Nazi helmets. Bayonets. Huge wall banners with swastikas and rising suns. He had old reveille bugles, sword straps and scabbards, minefield marking flags, gasmasks and artillery rucksacks – all of it carefully hooked and draped and tacked over much of the available space. He even had an old olive-drab metal desk. I can imagine it all gave the office a ferocity that baffled anyone who walked in, especially if their purpose was to discuss some label or coupon on a juice can or milk container. But that was Patrick, the hula girl said. “He liked to own the element of surprise.” The old soldier was quite the risk taker too, according to his wife. One of his possessions was this old pineapple-style hand grenade, scary-looking but totally harmless. He took it with him whenever he traveled – and once, right after 9/11, he was detained trying to board a plane at the San Diego airport and nearly charged with a federal crime. I still wonder if it ever occurred to Patrick that “pineapple grenade” was another one of those mixed-up terms, soft and hard at the same time – and when you thought about it, an even more bizarre example than flower headquarters.
But his most prized item of all, the one that he said inspired him every day, was a large print of a portrait of President Harry Truman. A civilian, yes. But perhaps the greatest commander in chief ever, he said. A true soldier’s grit and the ability to give an order in the face of the greatest adversity – that was Truman. To the core.
We arrived in Hiroshima at night, hungry as wolves. If Angie and I had been by ourselves we would have probably stayed put and dined on hotel fare, where there was enough English on the menus for us to point to something and know what they were cooking us. But Christine asked a few questions, we strolled a few blocks and soon found ourselves climbing a rickety staircase in a building that was dark on the first two floors.
On the third floor we found bright paper lanterns, noise and bustle, and lots of griddle-sizzle and mouth-watering aromas. The place was filled with locals swigging draft beer and chowing down. Nothing fancy, just long tables and cheap chairs. One of the waiters squeezed us in, Christine did the ordering, and soon we were digging into plate-sized pancakes layered with noodles, eggs, pork, cabbage, and I don’t know what – a kind of Asian pizza. Huge and filling, and impossible not to finish.
That was the beauty of being with Christine: she talked the talk. Angie and I called her the hula girl because she had grown up around Honolulu – in a land where they grew pineapples, not grenades – and that very first night back in flower headquarters she had given us a little demo of how she could still swing those hips. “If I had a fighter plane,” Patrick had bragged, “I’d paint her on the nose.”
Christine spoke the Hawaiian style of Japanese, maybe not the King’s English in Tokyo, but good enough to get us into doors vacationers from clam-land normally don’t even see. Angie and I were new at Japan: Angie had been doing the Ikebana arrangements for years, but this was our first trip there. What we learned that night, to our surprise, was that this was Patrick’s first time too.
“He knows nothing about Japan,” Christine said. “He thinks he does, but he doesn’t. Now that he’s met me, he can see the real deal.”
I took a long swallow from the iced mug of Kirin. “You mean the two of you aren’t an old married couple? You act it.”
It turned out they had only met two years ago, and they were still finding things out about each other. Patrick was pure white-bread Missouri, just like Harry Truman. Christine was all Japanese and her story started in California, near Sacramento.
“Go on, tell them about the cockroaches,” Patrick said. “They’re finished eating.”
His remark wiped the smile from her face as abruptly as if he had slapped her. What replaced it was a poker face, so polite and implacable it could have been on one of those dolls we’d seen all over the Kyoto souvenir shops. You could tell that, behind the frozen face, she was embarrassed – even enraged – at the mere mention of the word cockroaches. But Patrick had that drill sergeant look of his, and the hula girl went on.
“So, we were poor,” she said, “that’s a fact. My grandparents and future parents left everything in Sacramento. What we had in the islands were those island cockroaches, so big you could hear them before you saw them. We had this tomcat too. He’d catch the cockroaches at night and bite off one of their legs, just one, so all they could do was this spinning thing. In the morning we’d wake up and find six huge cockroaches, all spinning like tops. My husband thinks that’s funny…”
Patrick patted the hula girl’s shoulder. “At ease, private, you’ve done your duty. Now I’ll do mine.” He waved over a waiter and ordered us another round.
By the time Angie and I left the restaurant we understood why Christine was so frosted about the cockroaches. They symbolized her family’s exile.
“I mean, my grandfather wasn’t exactly small potatoes in Sacramento,” she said. “He had a dry goods store. Clientele mostly Japanese, sure, but the place was a goldmine. There were no cockroaches in that house, I can assure you. But maybe I can’t – I wasn’t even born yet.”
Patrick piped up, his voice slightly boozy. “Her family spent time in the original Hotel California. Guests of FDR.”
Christine froze her eyes on Angie, as though the men were not to be trusted with what she was about to say. “From hearing my mother tell it, the concentration camp wasn’t the worst part. That was later, after the damage had been done. I mean the home, the fine home that was destroyed, the reputations and connections …”
At that moment Patrick could have been Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, standing on the beach with the shells crashing around him, somehow immune and untouchable, as though war just couldn’t hurt him – and certainly not any conversation having to do with war.
“The worst thing,” Christine went on, “was the inspectors that came to the house before there was even talk of sending my family away. My mother said they combed through all of my grandmother’s possessions. Anything that was too Japanese they told her to throw out, and fast. She had recordings, Japanese recordings of popular musicians. They were especially menacing about those. They told her she’d better destroy every last one of them.”
After their release, the family never recovered. The store was gone. They fled to a place that was neither America’s mainland nor Japan’s, and years later Christine was born. “I was the Hawaiian Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” she said, eyes boring into Angie’s. “How the mighty hath fallen. From castles to cockroaches.”
Long, tall strips of neon marked the many towers muscling skyward in Hiroshima, and our hotel was one of them. The view from our panoramic window was all dazzle and flash, a thriving, rebuilt city showing its muscle. But in the morning we looked out on utter greyness: the sky, the buildings, the mournful geometry of structures and walkways and monuments created for a purpose so enormous it could never be attained on this earth: the atonement for the nuclear catastrophe, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima’s civilian population. We breakfasted quickly and left the hotel on foot for the memorial grounds, Patrick setting a rapid pace and moving stiffly, as though he were marching as much as walking. The contrast between the old soldier and the hula girl was extreme to the point of seeming insane. Her face was consumed by grief. His looked as though he might be parading into battle. They walked apart, in single file, each on a separate and evidently opposite mission. And although not a word was said, it was clear to Angie and I that we should let the two of them do whatever it was they had come to do. We hung back and let the crowd visiting the hallowed bomb site fold around us and sweep us from their view.
We re-connected with them that night at the hotel bar, but soon it began to seem that the old soldier and the hula girl might not survive another night as a couple, married or otherwise. Patrick drank hard and spoke violently, railing at something he had read on a diorama at the Hiroshima bomb museum. Angie and I had seen it too. It was a caption to a horrifying photo of burned, tortured human beings. The caption took a point of view on his hero, Truman, a perspective that Patrick found reprehensible. It said the U.S. had been ready to drop the atomic bomb on Germany as early as 1943, when the German armed forces were still strong and the outcome was still in doubt. Instead, the Americans held off. Only under Truman, when the Japanese had virtually surrendered in secret talks with the Russians, was the decision made to A-bomb civilians, and then only Japanese civilians. Far and away the biggest reason for the attack, according to the diorama caption, was that Truman and his power circle wanted to justify the billions of dollars the government had spent developing the monster weapon.
“How can they print lies like that?” Patrick raged. “Truman acted to save lives, American lives. Every schoolchild knows that…”
He drank hard and bellowed his case, turning heads up and down the bar. “I had two uncles who died in the Pacific. Brothers. They were blown to pieces. It left my grandfather staring at doors…”
As it happened, the purpose of Christine’s visit was to find a large tomb on the memorial grounds. In it were the unidentified bones of thousands of bombing victims. She was certain that some of them belonged to old family members, relatives from her grandparents’ generation, and she knelt at the great block of stone and prayed for their ancestral souls.
Although the old soldier stormed out of Japan the next day – booked a flight and stormed out forever, he vowed – the hula girl said she wanted to stay, and stay with us as well. She wanted to take us to the mountain country, she said, to view one of Japan’s many active volcanoes. We reached it by tram, on a day that was bright, but chilly and gusty because of the elevation. A metal fence separated the sightseers from the slope plunging thousands of feet into the caldera, and scattered all over the site were small, hard-roofed shelters – there just in case the mountain blew – and signs warning asthma sufferers to beware of the poisons drifting up from the vast simmering mouth. A guard assured us, though, that on a day this clear there was no danger at all, so the three of us stayed a long time, leaning over the metal fence and peering into the liquid chaos below – white-green, steaming and infernal, like a sea of lethal acid from a Hollywood terror movie.
When the tram bell rang for the return trip, Angie and I turned to join the crowd straggling back from the caldera edge. But Christine stopped us, and we turned back and lingered where we were, the three of us pretty much all by ourselves. Then the hula girl reached into the tote bag she was carrying and pulled out an oval object, that olive drab icon from a thousand war movies. It was Patrick’s old army surplus collectible, the pineapple grenade. “I snatched it from his suitcase,” she said, her voice fighting the brisk mountain wind. “By now he probably wants to wring my neck.” And with that she drew her arm back and pitched the thing over the fence. Her intention, of course, was to hurl the grenade into the boiling liquid below, but her lob only managed to lift it into a brief arc followed by a short spasm of bouncing down the lava rocks of the slope. Then the bomb that was shaped like a fruit came to rest where we could still see it, wedged there for as long as it would take for the volcano to cause its obliteration – either by slow, seeping fumes or a moment’s burst of overwhelming fire.
This Saturday, March 27, in Kerrville, TX, two of Moulin Review’s nominations received awards from the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association.
Literary Magazine Essay Honorable Mention: Elena Harding – Religious Disagreement
Literary Magazine Short Story Honorable Mention: Brit Naylor – Hulking Leviathan the Sun
Congratulations to Elena and Brit! Click the titles to read the winning entries.
We at Moulin Review were proud to learn that Toshiya Kamei’s translation of Naoko Awa’s ‘Blue Shells”, which was published in our webjournal, will be published in “The Fox’s Window and Other Stories,” in which Kamei brings Awa’s work to English-speaking readers for the first time.
The collection uses traditional fairy tale structure and themes to comment on virtues like altruism, modesty, and persistence. The stories are unexpected despite their conventional elements, placed in surreal, provincial settings.
These fresh takes on the morality tale can be startlingly honest, as in the case of the girl who says, “Ask your mother to make me a rabbit … I’m not pretty. Everyone teases me about my freckles. I’d rather be a rabbit.”
The book itself is beautiful: a nice size, with enchanting cover art by Dallasite Amane Kaneko, and ghostly floral patterns on selected pages. The collection is appropriate for children as well as adults.
The whimsy and expressiveness of this collection cannot be overstated. “The Fox’s Window and Other Stories” is available for preorder on amazon.com here: http://www.amazon.com/Foxs-Window-Other-Stories/dp/1608010066/
Blue Shells
by Naoko Awa (Translated by Toshiya Kamei)
I’m going to tell you the story of a mysterious flared skirt I used to own. Sadly, I no longer have it. When I became obsessed with the skirt, my family hid it from me. Shortly later, it was burned in the war.
But I have never forgotten the dazzling blue of the skirt. Even now, when I close my eyes, I can see the color.
The skirt was made of silk, with an amply wide hem, which was rare in those days. During the war, most women wore monpe pants. So you can imagine how I attracted attention, how people spoke ill of me.
I was never a stylish girl. As a child, I wore only my sister’s hand-me-downs. My looks were homely, and my intelligence was average. I was a quiet, ordinary girl, and there was nothing special about me. I’m going to tell you how I became smitten with the blue skirt.
When I was twelve or thirteen, I was friends with a very beautiful girl named Michiru. The daughter of a foreign father and a Japanese mother, she had eyes blue as an iris. She lived with her mother in an old Western-style residence near my house. No one had seen her father. Rumor had it he was an Italian trader, an American sailor, or a German officer.
“My father is on a ship. He’s in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” said Michiru. “He came home late last night and gave me a present.” When she opened her palm, a necklace of shells spilled over.
I wanted to meet Michiru’s father, just once. But she never invited me to her house. No one had been inside the house surrounded by thick shrubs.
Even so, Michiru and I often played together. We went out and bought beautifully patterned chiyogami paper, showed each other boxes full of ribbons, and talked about books we read.
I was very fond of Michiru. When we walked together, she made passersby turn their heads. I was secretly proud of having such a beautiful friend.
One day – it was spring or early summer – Michiru came to my house. It was early afternoon, and the scent of thick green leaves wafted from the hedge.
“Michiru-san is in the back yard,” Mother said. I ran out the back door and found Michiru, whom I had last seen a few hours earlier. Wearing a new linen dress, she stood still.
“Yae-chan, can you keep a secret?” she whispered suddenly when she saw me. “I’ve come to say goodbye,” she said, lowering her voice.
I remained silent, stunned.
“We’re moving tonight,” she said.
“What? Where are you going?”
“A town by the sea. My mother’s home. But don’t tell anyone,” Michiri said and handed me a small package. “I give you this as a keepsake.”
“A keepsake? Is she going away for good?” I thought. Before I could say a word, Michiru left, as if fleeing. I still remember her white feet and her geta sandals echoing behind her. I unwrapped the package and found a blue flared skirt inside.
***
Blue Shells Original Manuscript
The next day I went to Michiru’s house. A crowd of people gathered around it. They looked at each other, whispered, and nodded: “Come to think of it, I heard a low clattering sound at night.”
“I see. He must have been using a typewriter.”
“That foreigner came out only at night, always hiding. No one had seen him by daylight.”
“I never imagined there was a spy in our neighborhood!”
A spy? My heart froze for a moment. Fear crept up my legs, then spread over my body. “It’s a lie! It’s not true!” I screamed inside my head, straining my ears to listen to the people in the crowd.
“The foreigner seems to have left early.”
“The wife and child followed him.”
It was the middle of war. Excited, the neighbors wondered about the whereabouts of the foreigner and his family.
“I hope they’ll get caught soon!” said the greengrocer’s wife, raising her fist into the air.
I screamed inside my head, “Run, Michiru! Run!” I prayed she and her parents would escape safely.
My knees buckling, I staggered away. I held a secret – Michiru’s destination. She had told me not to tell anyone.
As I walked, I kept telling myself not to reveal this secret. Even if the whole world turned against Michiru, I was still her friend.
The neighbors knew she and I were close friends. When they saw me in the street, they asked me all kinds of questions – whether I had met her father, or how her family lived. Every time they asked me a question, I told them I didn’t know. After a few days, I didn’t feel like going out.
I shut myself up in my room and thought about Michiru all day. I had a nightmare every night. I dreamed someone was pursuing me.
A town by the sea – these words weighed heavily on my mind, and my heart began to ache as if someone had died. For a twelve-year-old girl, it was a daunting task to keep a secret to herself.
***
One night I jolted awake by the same recurring nightmare. I slid a drawer of the chest open and took out the blue skirt Michiru had given me.
I put on the skirt. Since she was tall, it was too long for me. “I’ll have to raise the hem,” I whispered. I opened the workbox, found a blue thread, and passed it through the eye of a needle. I don’t know why I started needlework in the middle of night.
At any rate, I decided to raise the hem about five centimeters. But sewing the hem of the flared skirt was a lot of work. The hem was incredibly wide. Besides, the skirt was made of thin silk, and no matter how many times I stitched, I made little progress. The needle seemed to be motionless or moving backward.
As I kept moving the needle slowly, I thought about Michiru. I wondered where she was, how she was doing. After a while, the hem of the skirt began to look like the edge of the sea, like the long, arching shore.
Then I thought I heard Michiru’s footsteps from inside the cloth. She was running alone.
For some reason, she had no shoes on. She ran along the beach barefoot. I stood on the shore while the waves foamed, making white lace-like patterns on the sand.
“Michiru!” I cried in spite of myself, and broke into a run. The sand felt soft and wet under my feet. I, too, was barefooted. “Michiru, wait!” I kept calling her, but she didn’t look back. She ran faster and faster.
“Why, Michiru? I’m doing everything to keep your secret,” I thought. I watched her figure grow smaller and smaller in the distance.
On the verge of tears, I sat down. Then I saw her crouch down in the distance. She seemed to be picking up something. Or had she fallen down and wasn’t able to get up? Feeling sad, I stood up and plodded toward her.
I went up to her and called her from behind: “Michiru!”
Then she finally looked back. “It’s you, Yae-chan,” she said, flashing a friendly smile. “I’m gathering shells. Look, blue ones,” she said. She opened her palm, revealing a shell. It was small and thin as a cherry-blossom shell, but it was blue.
“Beautiful,” I mumbled. “I’ve never seen such a beautiful shell.”
Michiru gave a cheerful smile and said, “I’m gathering shells. I want to make a necklace.”
“A necklace?” I asked.
“Yes. We once made a necklace with camellias in the temple,” she said. “I want to make a long one with these shells. But I can’t focus on gathering shells. Every time I find one, someone comes after me.” She looked up and strained her ears. “Do you hear footsteps?” she said with an edge of fear in her voice. “It’s not just one person. There are three or five.”
“I don’t hear anything. That’s the sound of waves,” I said, laughing.
Then we went back to picking up shells. After gathering a few, however, Michiru looked up again and said, “I hear footsteps. Not just one person. It’s ten or twenty people.”
“I don’t hear anything except the sound of the wind,” I said and laughed again.
Looking worried, Michiru nodded and began to look for shells again. But soon she cried, “I hear footsteps. They’re after me!”
She got up and ran. The shells fell from her skirt, scattering over her feet. They had the same color as the sea. When I held a shell against the sun, it became tinted with purple, filtering the sunlight. Captivated by the beautiful shells, I didn’t go after Michiru. I stayed there for a long time.
When I realized it, she was only a dot in the distance.
“Michiru! Michiru!” I called her as a burst of wind scattered my voice. I kept calling her. “Michiru! Michiru!”
A voice called me from beyond the sea. “Yae-chan, Yae-chan.” Beyond the sound of the wind, a familiar voice kept calling me.
When I looked back, I saw a naked light bulb flicker over my head. The shoji door slid open, and my older sister peeked in. “Yae-chan, what’s the matter? You were screaming,” she said.
Later, she told me I was shaking, looking pale. With my eyes hollow, I looked as if I had a fit.
***
A few days later, I heard a rumor about Michiru. In her mother’s hometown, she and her mother threw themselves into the sea. I wondered if she, a blue-eyed girl, met with a cold reception over there. Or the rumors about her father had already reached the town.
Then I became captivated by Michiru’s blue skirt. I wanted to see her again. As my longing to see her grew, I started acting boldly.
After school, I slipped into the skirt, went out shopping, and went to a friend’s house. “You shouldn’t wear a foreigner’s skirt,” my friends said. “She looks like one of them,” they said behind my back.
But it didn’t bother me. As I walked, the hem of the skirt swirled, making me feel cheerful. When I ran through the wind, I felt as if I were floating in the air. When I played jump rope with my friends, I was able to jump higher than before. When I jumped really high, I thought I caught a glimpse of the sea beyond the roofs of houses. Yes, beyond the sea, I saw an island carpeted with evening primroses.
“Yae-chan, you’re like a bird,” my friends said.
Oh, how I wished I were a bird! I wished I could fly to the beach where Michiru and I had gathered shells. Maybe it was a faraway island. Those beautiful shells weren’t found anywhere in Japan.
When I thought about the blue shells, my heart became tight with yearning, tears welling up. My family kept an eye on me from a distance. One day when I came home from an errand, I discovered the blue skirt was gone. Maybe my mother locked it up in a drawer. But no one ever mentioned it again. No matter how many times I asked, I received no answer.
A few years later, the skirt was lost in the fire.
_________________________________________________________
Naoko Awa, 1943-1993
Q&A with Translator Toshiya Kamei
Q: Tell me about yourself.
A: I’m the translator of The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (Host Publications, 2008) by Liliana Blum and The Fox’s Window and Other Stories (UNO Press, forthcoming) by Naoko Awa. My other translations have appeared in Straight to Darkness (Kurodahan Press, 2006), The Global Game (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), and Sudden Fiction Latino (W.W. Norton, 2010).
Q: Where are you from?
A: I was born in Saitama, Japan, and went college in New Mexico.
Q: Are you still a student at the University of Arkansas?
A: No, I graduated in May 2008.
Q: What is your degree in?
A: I hold an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas, where I was the 2006-2007 Carolyn Walton Fellow in Translation. Excerpts from my thesis, a translation of Spanish writer Espido Freire’s novel Irlanda, have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, The Modern Review, and Words without Borders. At Arkansas, I also studied fiction with Molly Giles and poetry with Geoffrey Brock.
Q: What is your first language?
A: I spoke Japanese at home and learned English and Spanish at school.
Q: How many languages do you speak? What are they?
A: I have taken graduate courses in Spanish. I have traveled in Spanish-speaking countries, such as Mexico, Peru, and Spain.
Q: What are your goals?
A: I hope to get married and start a family.
Q: What are your hobbies?
A: Reading and traveling.
Q: How did you come across “Blue Shells” to translate?
A: The story will be included in The Fox’s Window and Other Stories, Naoko Awa’s first story collection in English. I have selected and translated 30 stories she wrote during her literary career, which spanned three decades.
Q: Did you know Naoko Awa?
A: No. I read her stories as a child. I still own a yellowed copy of her book, which my parents bought me just as I was beginning to read independently. Some of the stories I have translated for the collection appeared in textbooks in Japan.
Q: What do you know about her?
A: If she were alive today, she would be my mother’s age. In Japan, she is known for her lyrical prose, which explores the intersection between humans and nature. It’s my honor to introduce her works to English-speaking readers.
Q: Do you write original pieces?
A: Yes. Not enough time, though.
Q: If so, can you tell me about them?
A: Maybe next time.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share?
A: The Fox’s Window and Other Stories by Naoko Awa will be published in 2010.
Power Lines - Geoffrey Spurgin
We allowed ourselves to believe no one cared where we were. We played hockey in the street. We slashed each other’s shins until we were bleeding, but no one would go back home for a band-aid, or to Mike Wheeler’s house, even though it was right there. Not one of us would even rinse his legs with the hose at the side of the house. There would be no profession of pain. When we were done, we spread out across the neighborhood, and one of us would strive to understand the nature of our Diaspora or else become delirious and slow in his wandering, fearful of how we were going to make him out to be dimwitted. We would taunt him. We would seek him out first when it was his turn to hide. It was a jocular love, a brotherly love; he was one of us, did he understand this? When we got tired of it, when even Joey Grabel had been found out on the roof of someone’s garage or, once, in a dumpster, when Mike said for the fifth time, I hate this stupid game, then we quit our stupid game and ran with bloody shins down Switcher toward the park. We played with a wilted football that arced like a comet toward the earth, a comet because more often than not we caught it, knowledgeable as we were of the shift and wobble of the sad flying object, made out above the sun like a silhouetted spacecraft or Armageddon right up until we caught it in our arms. Then we ran. We ran until our lungs were burning. And that fire was everywhere.
This was the summer, the last summer, before middle school, before girls, before drugs and social politics. The last summer where one of us didn’t want to smoke a cigarette, just to see, the last summer, in fact, before we realized that that hoarseness in our lungs some days was caused by the same force that made our sunsets beautiful, that turned them into orange leviathans crashing and turning the world to shadows. It was the last summer, for that matter, where we didn’t know what beauty was, but only how it felt, the last summer where everything was still like that, right down to our bloody shins. The last summer to be ignorant, to never guess that ignorance was what we would miss. The sun was so hot and we never really noticed it, though it baked the skin off our bodies in flakes, flakes we peeled perpetually, and with great zest, because we loved the way the husks of ourselves felt between our fingers. That summer heat rose up out of everything, hot flat rocks and sticky tar and dead grass, and Ms. Spitzer’s cats slunk about in the shadows of houses, looking tired and somehow ashamed; how could we have been unaffected?
We were affected, but we were guided by faith, a faith, the faith, older than Christ and written in our genes, a latent swan song stirred up by the simple act of existence. By the heat without us, within us, for it came, too, from our bones as they struggled, sprouted, and our dicks, they wanted to grow up without us. It seemed unfair. It was a conspiracy. Our faith, our ineffable and obdurate faith led us on with the evening, away from the flagship of the sun which burned always whether or not we cared.
Our faith led us toward a holy place, a reprieve from the heat, for the rest of life would hold no such caesura until death. We were to exist in no other form, not yet, not just yet, and so we ran back from the park down Switcher, it was a race now, all of us becoming quick shadows of ourselves in the growing night, and we felt that we were part of some group of soldiers like from the videogames that our older brothers played, we couldn’t play them, it was the last summer before some of us could. The violence was sleeping in our steps, in our hands, as we fanned out, ducking between houses and through alleys, losing sight of one another but knowing we were all there. We passed Joey’s house, and Mike’s house, then Chris’s though they all looked the same. We were feeling our way. Sweat dripped down from our temples and between our shoulder blades, a tickle there.
We heard the roar of cars off ahead, that’s how close we were. The lights shimmied up from everything – the cars, the houses, the streetlights, the office buildings – and spread out like a haze, so there were no stars overhead, only Venus and the moon. Even in darkness we were half-lit. We could feel the blood moving just beneath our skin, believed we might be able to see it glow, even, were it not for our modern world. We believed this somewhere deep down, in that place without cognitive thoughts, only secrets. That’s where we were going, after all.
We reached the rod iron gate in movements: the first of us scrambled over as the last of us emerged from between the houses, panting. We stripped down to our underwear, became fleshy apparitions in the fluorescent light from the Wal-Mart parking lot that filtered through the trees and got tangled in the pool, bounced against the blue tiles. And then we –
We jumped. We weren’t aware of our bodies, or each other, or the moon, or the beads of sweat that ran like strangled rivers. We weren’t aware, even, of the water, as it enveloped us. More, what it did: our condition was changed and, buoyant for a moment, we felt not what we were but what we weren’t, not anymore.
Inside the Wylie Police Department station, the day crew is hard at work trying to finger the guilty.
“Hey, Wilson? You ever read the book Brave New World?” asks Peters.
“Shoot! Been since high school.”
“Well, what’d your teacher tell you you were suppose to get from it?”
“You mean like, what’s the author trying to tell us? Well, I suppose it’s a cautionary tale of the potential evils when you mess with the Almighty’s work.”
“Well, I’ll be. I didn’t get that at all. Sure, I was scared and all at first, but then I got to thinking. That Bernard fellow was a miserable son of a bitch. Everyone else round him was happy, so all he did was try to ruin the party. I kept thinkin’ Shut up man! Not everybody hates the world like you do.”
“But Peters. Them were BRAINWASHED people. That’s the only reason they were happy.”
“But still… they were happy.”
Officer Jenkins jumps in. “Bernard was trying to free those people from their mental slavery. See, they was brainwashed in the beginning.”
“Yeah, I know. But he was also freeing them from their happiness. Way I see, if you’re happy, you’re happy. No matter how you got there. That’s the point. Happiness.”
“But what about freedom?” asks Wilson.
“Les ask the captain. Captain Cunningham? What’s more important, happiness or freedom?” shouts Jenkins.
“Hmmm . . . that’s a toughie. I gotta go with happiness. I mean, what’s the point of freedom unless’n you’re happy? When you’re miserable, freedom don’t mean horseshit. If anything, you got nobody else to blame but yourself. That’d prolly tick me off even greater. No, I’d rather have happiness.”
“Well, I’ll be! Captain’s right! Happiness does sound much better than freedom,” says Wilson, slapping his knee.
Just at that moment the radio on the wall speaks up. “Officers need assistance at 2284 Ohio Drive.”
“Wilson! Peters! You’re up!”
Well, he could just lay there and wait to be killed. He wasn’t sure what to do about this enclosing predicament. It was either try something stupid or wait. What there was to wait for was another intellectual dilemma. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t annoyed. He was just . . . there. Felix Belazzio wasn’t sure if he should be bothered that he had no emotional response to his situation. Probably a result of fighting so many fronts. It was another ridiculous problem that should have never happened in the first place. His predecessor obviously didn’t think this through. And now it was his problem.
Surely, if he moved, the Vilentro would hear him. He was sure they were gathering outside of the opening. Unless they were taking a break. He could hear their raspy voices gurgling in their tongues as quietly as they were able to talk. Their concept of whispering always made their tones harsher rather than softer. But that was not the problem Belazzio had to resolve today. He had to continue with his mission or spawn back to base. The Vilentro made both options harder than they seemed.
He poked around in his uniform one more time, pawing around for that disc that would make one of those options a better possibility. He still could not find the marker. He could have kicked it down or placed it in another pocket. He supposed with the scramble to research his next mission and fumbling around for more magazines to reload, he could have slipped it anywhere. And then he closed his eyes in shame for not carrying more than one in the first place. But the confines of the box made it more unlikely a thorough search could be done without alerting his curious and raspy foes.
Belazzio wasn’t sure what to make of his cozy quarters. Some equivalent of a ventilation shaft. Or even more likely, some type of laundry or garbage chute. It had a slight tilt to it. He tried to look down to see what was below. He saw a good portion of his crotch and the belt that seemed to be hanging by threads. Other than that, his black uniform camouflaged him against the dark. However, he did see the flashing red of the markers’ lights hanging on those threads. They sat winking at him right next to the blinking green light of his shield generator like a row of Xmas lights.
He could slither down…like a Vilentro. They looked more like bipedal salamanders to him. If it wasn’t for the snake-like rhythm of their language, he supposed nobody would think of them as snake-like. Domed heads, big black pool ball eyes, and a wide gaping mouth that opened like a trash lid was all that assembled their features. He thought a child had drawn them; God lazily approved the design and sent it to the shop.
The crank of a door whistled down the shaft. He hurriedly grabbed for his klank, but it was jammed between his thigh and the shaft wall. The brushing noise he made seemed too loud, so he stopped. There were no sounds, no voices, no rushing of feet; not even a humming of machinery. There was just the pounding of his heart knocking against the metal wall.
Moon Landing - Geoffrey Spurgin
And then came down some trash. It looked like their version of a turnip slash potato and some meat that he allowed to pass along the side and continue its journey down. The turnip he trapped with his chin and rolled towards a hand to slip it under his waist. The meat he didn’t want to think about. It made him think of his crippled uncle who had been enslaved by the Vilentro. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t need the anger. He didn’t need an excuse to hate the Vilentro more; he needed a thought.
He managed to pull one arm free and felt around for the laser knife from his undercoat. There it was, like a miniature light saber. It made a hissing sound like crawfish boiling in water as it seared into the vent wall. It was quiet enough that his cruel counterparts indicated no revelation to his whereabouts. Such as “Do you hear something? I think that other human is in the garbage chute. Let’s drop some grenades on his head. Heehee.” He picked a spot under his eye and made a small hole. The power shut down. Something turned off. Not like he could see anything except the shaft and the grate. Now, he was in the shaft and the dark.
He removed the knife and peered into the hole. Just as he suspected. Complete blackness. Next problem, how to pray fast enough that God would prevent the snakeheads from discovering he was the culprit. Eventually have their way with him, grinding him up so he could be aside a couple of turnips. Now, he was annoyed; maybe getting frustrated. Felix was then reflecting on what fucking idiot dropped a marker down a shaft where he spawned. Not only that, but not stick around and cover his drop!
He knew it wasn’t worth this much grief. As far as he knew, it was an accident. And there were only three choices available to him. One, crawl up, catch the Vilentro by surprise and continue with the mission. He wasn’t even able to turn on his shield. It would probably be suicide. His armor would protect him only to a point. Two, make a hole in the shaft, and then hope it leads to a safe avenue to return on course, or safe enough to spawn back home. He might drop into a chasm or Vilentro’s arms or a legion’s gymnasium. He could wave to them before they start shooting. Be friendly, first.
Three, crawl down and pray it’s not a furnace at the end.
He crawled down, slowly, stopping periodically to check on his peers above him. There were no changes in their behavior. Perhaps content with their victory over his predecessor. He moved quicker now, confident he was far enough along that they could not hear him. Some luck, here came some more trash. He moved faster, using the trash as a cover for his movements. He kicked something. It was metal. It rolled, bounced and splashed. The marker. It must have been the marker. The one the soldier before him had dropped into the shaft.
It wasn’t that far. Maybe another twenty feet. Belazzio was feeling no heat from below or around him. It could be water. It could be worse. It could have fallen into the kitchen soup surrounded by hungry and angry Vilentro. Belazzio’s imagination never helped him in the military life. It seemed to hurt him as he dreamed up the worst scenarios.
Boy Rides Lizard - Geoffrey Spurgin
An intense hiss echoed off the walls. The Vilentro may have found him. The grate opened. He could see the silhouetted dome of one of the salamanders, hissing hysterically. A beam of red light shimmered off the walls and caught him with his eyes squinting for breath. The others hissed in agreement that they had truly discovered the human soldier and seemed to hiss in quite a long discussion about how to dispose of him.
While they discussed, for what seemed like hours but was most likely seconds, Belazzio grabbed the laser knife and sliced a hole big enough to free his arm. With his arm free, he plugged a few digits in the band which was wrapped around his opposite arm. Felix furiously retyped as it clicked in error every time he hit the wrong keys. Pellets burrowed into his armored shoulders, burning like welder coals. He knew it was a lot worse, but the pain increased after each digit was pressed. A pellet bounced off his helmet. Keep your head down.
At last, the final digit pressed and the sound of a flock of birds swallowed in a vacuum followed up the shaft. He thrust down the shaft, hoping the portal was directly below him. A grenade began to chase after him; his hands slipping against the metal, goo and his gloves. He pushed rapidly like a rushing salamander; the grenade hopping happily towards him. His legs dropped below his waist as he fell. Instinctively, his finger was poised on the release button to collapse the portal so the grenade would not finish him off on the other end. He saw a horizon of a lime-green pool of acid surround him as he was enveloped by the portal and landed on his back against the floor of the T’ip room. The portal closed and he was alone again. But not in the dark or in the shaft.
