Seven Microstories
Amy Hirayama
Shannon had his pants down before we even reached the pebble bed. I said, “How ‘bout a little romance, huh?” I liked the look of him, though, the way his nose had grown since we first met at the ocean. He was bigger then, with a swimmer’s body made for lapping, and those freckles up and down his torso. Mmm!
The pants weren’t going on again, but he indulged me with a dance, wiggling those skinny hips so hard he shed some scales right there in front of me. Was there privacy? No. I would have liked a little time alone, a chance to tell him things that I’d been thinking for a long, long time. Like how I saw a woman crying by the river once, and she made me feel how dumb it is to be alone.
We got our groove on in the pebble bed. Shannon almost fought with some rotten meathead who liked my style. I told them both to chill. (Don’t tell Shannon, but I invited meathead to meet me upstream later.)
After makin’ babies, Shannon was worn out, so I pecked him on the cheek, said see ya in the next life, and left him there to die.
When I told my husband that, actually, I’m seaweed, he said, “Huh. I can see that,” and went back to scraping his fork across the plate. He had no questions.
I wasn’t asking for a cinematic reaction, just a little curiosity. It would have been nice if he’d said, “What do you mean you’re actually seaweed? You don’t look like seaweed. Except for your hair, which has always been that brown kelp color, and now that I think about it, the first time we kissed I thought you tasted salty.”
And I would have said, “That’s brine. I’m brined!”
And he would have laughed and said, “Oh my God, this is crazy! So all those times when we were at the beach, and those little crabs found their way onto our blanket?”
“It’s because I’m seaweed. They thought I was a snack!”
“And what about the time when we were hiking on the bluff and that eagle kept dive-bombing you, like it wanted to carry you away?”
“They use seaweed in their nests!”
“So it wasn’t just my imagination that that one sushi chef seemed kind of obsessed with you every time we went for omakase?”
“I’m really good seaweed!” I would have said.
It would have been nice to explain why I’m so good at cooking fish, and why my skin gets leathery in the cold, dry winter and why I can eat so much salt without raising my blood pressure.
Instead he said, “It’s not important. I love you anyway.”
I realized, after twenty years, I was living in a jar of cocktail onions, white bulbs with visible veins. I couldn’t take another day up against the glass, so I left the jar, onions crying.
I found a bunch of grapes, sweet, but seedy, always peeling off their clothes. I liked the juice, the wine, the raisins; but, wine turns to vinegar and raisins turn to rocks, and so I left the vineyard.
I fell in with a pack of marbles, hard and violent. I liked to watch them slapping glass and chipping teeth in fits of fury. I tried to roll with them, but busted blood vessels.
I thought the bag of party ice was love. I misunderstood. I bathed in bourbon and thrilled at the intimacy of cold, while it lasted. I should have noticed the melting.
I soothed my frostbite in a bowl of tapioca. I’d never known such warmth. I’d never felt so sticky. I never suspected I’d tire of togetherness. I discovered that kindness can be cloying.
I met a foreign object.
I met some dust.
I met saline.
I met smoke.
I don’t know where to look now.
We wanted to cook some forgiveness, but mother used up all the flour and she forgot to buy more eggs and the milk was bad. She wasn’t home.
We were ready, we put our little aprons on and tied each other’s bows. We pulled our chairs up to the counter so we could reach the cupboards with the mixing bowls and spices. Gentle with the big glass bowl, we reminded each other. It’s tough but it will break if you’re not careful.
Mother wasn’t home, but we tried to make it anyway. At the sink we scrubbed our hands and frothed the soap just like she taught us to. No germs in our forgiveness! We turned the oven on and greased the pan with Crisco, but couldn’t dust it without flour.
We tried to remember the recipe, but I know we got it wrong.
We used cornmeal, which was kind of scratchy on our tongues, and mixed powdered creamer with warm water, the closest thing to milk. We put in extra soda to make it grow bigger bigger, the biggest forgiveness anyone had ever cooked.
The white sugar had ants in it, so we pulled every kind of sweetness from the pantry – condensed milk, maple syrup, rainbow sprinkles, molasses, honey.
In the oven our forgiveness rose.
When we pulled it out we celebrated, until the cold air pressed it down again and we choked on our first bites.
The day my husband started to look like me was the same day he stopped eating my food. After thirteen years he decided it wasn’t to his taste. I was surprised because we cooked the same food on a schedule. Mondays fish, Tuesdays spaghetti, Wednesdays teriyaki chicken, Thursdays omelets, Fridays stew, Saturdays leftover stew, Sundays peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Now every time I cooked, he made a parallel meal. Same recipes, same ingredients, different cooks.
His hair got longer and it went from the color of wheat bread to the color of black and white sesame seeds mixed in a bowl. The angle of his jaw softened and his mouth got smaller and more pink.
It was also the same day the girls started to look like my husband. Their eyes faded from black to blue and they grew little beards. They stopped eating my food too.
Eventually there were two of me in my size and two of my husband in children’s sizes and I stopped cooking altogether. I stopped coming to the dinner table because my husband said everything I was going to say, and the girls always got food in their beards, which was disgusting.
On the day I left they were eating spaghetti. I watched them from the window and I thought, “What a happy little family.”
Mother told us when the moon cries, that’s how pearls are made. They drip from her eyes and plop into the ocean in the night. She told us the moon’s skin feels like whipped cream and that the craters come from stars who want to kiss her face. Mother said the moon waxes when she feasts on nebulae and drinks the milky way.
But Mother was a liar. Everybody knows that the moon is a man, and so is the sun, and so are the stars, and the moon doesn’t cry, it only beams. We told her, Mother, that’s not where pearls come from, they’re bits of sand in an oyster shell, which is science, Mother, which we believe in more than we believe in you. That’s not whipped cream, it’s just dust, and the moon has no appetite, it has no belly, you can’t drink a galaxy because galaxies aren’t liquid, Mother.
She poured us another glass of spoiled skim milk and waned.
There’s no soap in the afterlife, and so we are fastidious.
We don’t smell. It’s not a matter of hygiene. It’s the sheets. We only get one.
At first we want to keep wearing our old clothes, at least those of us who die in clothes.
The poor girls who die naked are so relieved to have a sheet. They wrap it around themselves and hold it tightly. Sometimes they stay concealed for months. We might glimpse a shiny brown eye or the tip of a toe if they’re out and about, walking with the rest of us. But usually they crumple up beneath the weeping willow tree and breathe, their sheets rising softly.
Occasionally there’s a rebellious soul who enters naked (sex-related heart attack) and struts around in all his stupid glory. We don’t let him near the weeping willow.
It’s not a bad idea to wear your old clothes for a while. It means your sheet will stay clean just a little longer. But eventually the seams begin to chafe, the fabric starts to itch and you feel silly all dolled up in crowds of sheet-clad fellow dead.
Without soap all we can do is give our sheets a good thrashing in the river. Too much washing and the fabric’s tender fibers start to fray. But leave a smudge too long it will set indefinitely, which is a serious word in the afterlife, and you might become Lydia with the grass stain on her bum or Carlos with the dick-shaped grease mark on his chest.
Amy Hirayama is a writer and educator from Seattle. She teaches English at South Seattle College, is a creative writing instructor with Writers in the Schools, and serves as programs director at Common Area Maintenance.
