The garden facing the windows is a miniaturized paradise of pockmarked cobblestones, potted greenery, and dried, scattered leaves the color of crushed cinnabar, desert sand, and fresh cherries. Red, chocolate brown, deep, dark green, and the ravishingly navy blue of a darkening sky. A backwards glance at fall in windy spring. I nurse a cup […]
In the gray light of very early evening, the cherry blossoms along the river glow like clusters of tiny moons. A brisk, unseasonably cold wind hums pleasantly through the street. Its voice mingles with the rumbling of cars and the pitter-patter of soft rain, generating a misty, muffled soundscape that feels like standing with toes […]
I brush out my braid and rip apart the plastic packaging of a pregnancy test. Plum blossoms grow in scattered patterns of pinky purple along the dark, twisted, mottled branches of the tree outside. I sweat, in chalice-shaped patches, onto the torso and sleeves of my polyester shirt. The dye on the test runs suggestively […]
My workplace is about an hour from home on foot. As the day swivels into evening, I button up my jacket and exit the building, my hands jammed in my pockets. My thoughts pour from my mind and drain away into the frigid air. The sky is blue-black and dotted with wispy clouds, like white […]
Winter approaches like a hook angling through cloudy water. But the temperature stays just tepid enough that the leaves can keep their grip on the branches, resisting that final, funereal change. They move in the trees like a whirling, upturned skirt of orange, coral, and amber, and I almost believe they’ll outlast the snow. When […]
I wake from dreamless, cloudless, uninterrupted, nourishing sleep. My brain feels like a freshly swept room. The neurons threaded like purple silk strands through my mind hum pleasantly, soothingly, each synapse on beat with my footfall on the hardwood, the rainfall out the window, the fireball blazing across a face on the diamond eye of […]
A typhoon approaches. Its outer rain bands encircle western Japan, bathing the city of Tokyo for 72 hours in constant, irrepressible rain. At three in the morning, I am awoken by the sound of water gurgling loudly in the drain outside. Sun for two straight weeks. Working from home in a groundfloor apartment shrouded by […]
The life of a lie can last a millisecond or a million years. The life of a lie can belong to a pauper or a prince. In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, the lie is about extreme moneymaking, personal prosperity, individuality, brokering power, cheating death, and the meaning of freedom. In […]
On my way home from graduation, I brake too abruptly at a stoplight, causing the front tire on my bicycle to turn and skid. Something in the weave of reality contorts too far and snaps, and I tip over onto the asphalt. My right thigh takes most of the impact, and two nights later, like […]
Summer has edges that feel so defined. The horizon looks like a chiseled corner fold; a thin gold-green edge balancing against forget-me-not blue. I close my eyes and imagine that we live inside a handmade paper dodecahedron, its faces cutting into the atmosphere, scarring the sky in vertical stripes. I imagine that, if I reach […]
