“Cranes” was a runner-up in the 2019 Stony Brook Short Fiction Prize.
Harvest moon:
Around the pond I wander
And the night is gone.
– Matsuo Basho
Every evening as the sun burns the sky, the cranes walk along the lake shore. Artificial boundaries like property lines mean nothing to them; they strut across the bank of sand between each backyard and the water. They appear from behind an overgrown bush and make their way to the banana tree on the other end of her property. From her spot on the back porch, she has a perfect view of them.
There are three of them, a family. Mother, father, and child. The parents lead, trusting that their kin will follow. All three share the same perfect posture, heads held high at the tops of towering necks. Their long legs create an awkward gait, so they bob back and forth with each step. They pay no mind to the prickly edges of the aloe plants as they walk through them, clumped together near the bench overlooking the water. She wonders if the plants are scratching their legs, if she should uproot them in the morning, but they never look down as they walk.
The child stops at the fountain, watching the angel pour out her endless bucket of water. Father keeps walking, the ferns up to the base of his lanky neck, but mother turns to check on her baby. She honks, an unpleasant sound, but not the bugle call heard when they land a few houses down. The child seems reluctant to leave the trickling water, but obeys its mother as it should.
When the cranes reach the banana tree, they stand there for a moment. From her porch, she offers a wave, but the birds don’t acknowledge her. She suspects that they feel her eyes on them because they remain paused long enough for her to admire them. She loves the contradiction of their red-crested heads and dull gray bodies, the way that they are gawky and graceful all at once. “You’re beautiful,” she whispers, her voice barely louder than the sound of the fountain.
As if he heard, the father dips his head in a bow of thanks. Then, the family continues on to the next backyard, never looking back. She is left to watch the lizards dart across her porch, but they are panicked instead of poised. The sun has nearly sunk beneath the distant trees, so the little reptiles have been reduced to silhouettes anyway. She leaves the porch to wash her dinner plate and end her evening.
Grains of rice stick to her plate; not wanting them to fill up her drain, she sits on the floor by her trash can and picks them off one by one. A single grain gets caught under her fingernail, reminding her that the nails need to be cut. Flicking it into the trash can, the plate is finally devoid of rice and she takes it to the sink. The orange sauce slides away under the spray of water and the greasy residue of the gyoza is easily sponged off the plate. She inhales the lemony scent of the soap, remembers smearing suds on her former lover’s face long ago. She was wasteful then; now, she uses as little soap as necessary.
Once she dries her hands and places the plate and chopsticks back on their shelves, she prepares the house for sleep. The glass door separating the living room from the back porch must be slid shut and locked, which is what she does first. Then, she locks the front door and turns off the lights in her office, kitchen, and living room. Once that is complete, she is able to retreat to her bedroom.
It is a simple space, free from clutter. The bed rests on a low frame, centered along the back wall opposite the door. She sleeps with a quilt, white with the delicate design of sakura stretching across it. A lamp rests on top of the nightstand, whose drawer is full but hasn’t been opened in so long that it might as well be empty. There are only old letters inside, tucked in their envelopes and sorted chronologically. She refuses to reread them.
One of the remaining walls has the entrances to the bathroom and the closet; the other is taken over by three tall bookshelves, each completely filled. A careful eye can notice that she has alphabetized the novels.
She passes through the room to the closet, where she removes her pajamas from their spot on the shelf. The pale pink satin ripples as she carries it to the bathroom, setting it next to the sink. She avoids her own appearance in the mirror when she relieves herself, not making eye contact with the reflection until her hands are washed. The gray t-shirt slides easily over her head, but the jeans take a bit of wriggling to remove. She puts both in the laundry basket that sits in the corner of the bathroom, then removes the bra that she wears more for the feeling of womanhood than out of any need for support.
Standing in front of the mirror, she assesses herself. Her gaze is distant as woman and reflection scan one another. She can’t see lower than her mid-thighs, which is fine; her legs are too long, making her look awkward. The panties are pink cotton, matching her pajamas. Her eyes move past them, past the dark hair peeking out just over the edge of the waistband. She travels up her stomach, which has remained flat for as long as she can remember, and up her chest, which has remained nearly as flat. At her neck, she tries not to cringe. It is slender and long, slightly out of proportion with the rest of her body. Her black hair hangs smooth and flat along her spine, still as shiny as it was when she was a child. Her cheeks have a bit of red in them, and her skin is dewy. When she looks into her own eyes, they are dark but not without emotion.
She studies herself this way every night. Since her lover left, she has had no one to look at her objectively, to examine her. He used to pinch her chin between thumb and index finger, say, “Let me look at you, my love, so I can remember every detail.” She wonders if he remembers those details now.
Satisfied with her assessment, she slips into the pajamas, the fabric dancing across her skin. Then, she brushes her teeth, mint toothpaste spread across the white spines of the toothbrush. The foam has turned the same shade of white when she spits it out into the sink. Next, she runs a comb through her hair, though it seems unnecessary. Not a single strand is out of place after the long day.
Back in the bedroom, she takes five minutes to stretch, first her legs, then her arms. Holding her hands out in front of her, the fingers fan out as far apart from one another as possible without the knuckles aching. She rolls her shoulders and swings her head in a lazy circle to smooth out any cricks in her neck. This final evening ritual complete, she peels back the quilt and slides under it, laying flat on her back. When she turns off the lamp, it only takes a minute for her to fall asleep. The last thing she remembers is the way the white ceiling turned into a pitch-black abyss.
---
The dream has all the vibrancy of her youth. She is back on a Tokyo street, one that she left behind decades ago. When she looks down at herself, she sees that she’s wearing a simple white dress and matching shoes that remind her of a nurse’s uniform. It seems out of place among the blinking neon lights of the city. She no longer belongs in the place that once was hers.
Without realizing that she was walking, she arrives in front of the karaoke bar that she visited with her friends in her teenage years, the blinking sign echoing to her, you know me, you know me, you know me. It calls her inside. She waits at the counter, but no employee comes to assign her a room.
Impatient, she goes down the hallway and enters the third room on the left, where she and her friends used to scream songs by Britney Spears and Madonna. A spark of static electricity stings her palm when she touches the doorknob, but she continues turning it and steps inside.
There are no chairs or tables, no screen and no microphones. The room is dark; when she takes a step inside, she tumbles. A guttural cry bounces off the walls, and it takes a moment for her to realize that it’s coming from her own throat. It feels like she’s falling forever until suddenly her feet are firmly on the ground. At the bottom of the pit, she finds herself in a tunnel. In one direction, there is a pinprick of light. In the other, she hears a voice screaming. Her lover’s. She runs toward him without hesitation.
His agony is louder and louder the farther she runs, her toes barely touching the ground in her race to reach him. She makes out a word: help. She presses on. Just when she is finally about to reach him, her foot finds nothing to step on. Too fast to stop, she tumbles again. She’s freefalling until she isn’t anymore. When her feet find the floor of the tunnel, she turns away from the light again. Maybe this time she can reach him.
---
Her pillow is damp with sweat when she wakes up, but she soon forgets what the dream was about. She performs the evening routine in reverse: stretch, brush hair, brush teeth, remove pajamas, assess appearance, get dressed, relieve self. She removes For Whom the Bell Tolls from its place on the bookshelf and takes it with her to the kitchen.
Breakfast is simple: one fried egg, a slice of toast with strawberry jam, and a cup of coffee, bitter and strong. She stands at the counter to eat, careful not to let any crumbs fall to the floor. When she finishes, she washes the pan, spatula, and plate. The mug, though the few grounds left at the bottom are rinsed out, stays unwashed. She makes a second cup of coffee. While it brews, she unlocks the glass door, slides it open all the way so that the breeze skimming the lake’s surface fills the whole house.
She retrieves the mug and carries it and the book with her to the back porch. The sky is beginning to warm up for the day, color slowly bleeding into the gray. The light wind blows the steam from her coffee against her neck and face; the difference in temperature makes the hair of her arms stand on end. It doesn’t bother her. Undisturbed, she reads until the coffee is gone.
The majority of her day is spent in her office, empty except for a desk and chair. Her laptop is on the desk, its narrow cord snaking into the wall. From here, she is able to edit whatever articles have her name next to them on the spreadsheet. It’s a small publication, releasing stories once a week, but it pays well enough.
She reads through each article once to try to understand it. Then, she starts over, carefully deleting commas, adding semi-colons, and changing words. Any mistake would cost her the job, which she has had for a decade. She was still with her lover when they hired her. “Look at you!” he’d exclaimed. He had been so excited. “And English isn’t even your first language! You’ll get to write for them in no time.”
“Learning English as my second language is exactly why I’m good at this job,” she had explained to him. “You have to pay closer attention to the details.”
She never moved up to a writing position. After he left, she didn’t feel like she had anything to say. But she loved to edit, to sharpen others’ writing until every article was a knife that cut through the reader’s mind and left something behind. Her brain was out of ideas, but still knew the importance of sharing them. She wished that her brain was part of the assessments in the mirror.
Except to use the bathroom and have lunch, she spends the day at her laptop. When her work is finally complete, she prepares dinner. Tonight, she is having rice and steak, with some corn and green beans. Her mouth waters at the aroma of the meat and spices simmering together. She wants the steak to be tender enough that she can tear it apart with her chopsticks, so she is very attentive as she cooks. Her book rests on the other end of the counter; if it was an easier meal to prepare, she would read it.
She carries her dinner plate, loaded with food, and a glass of water to the back porch. Though she is facing the lake, all of her focus is on eating. She was raised to savor her meals. This one was one of her lover’s favorites, but she refuses to let the memory of him interrupt her eating. The steak is cooked to perfection.
---
When she finishes the meal, she takes the dishes back to the kitchen and returns to the porch. She stands by the screen, her nose almost touching it. The sky is on fire; it’s time for the cranes to return.
But they don’t come. She waits for ten minutes, the sun dipping lower and lower, but the procession never reaches her little patch of sand. Her heart slams against her chest as the fear that they will never arrive grows in her.
Unable to wait any longer, she slides her feet into sandals and walks out past the fountain to the edge of her backyard. The only sound is her angel’s water trickling down; there are no bugle calls, no graceless honks. She leans over the edge of the water, looking past the bush separating her yard from her neighbor’s, but doesn’t see the cranes. She checks the other direction too, in case they slipped past while she was eating. They are nowhere to be seen.
She’s about to go back inside, at a loss of what to do, when she notices a set of footprints in the sand. The three-pronged feet of a crane dug into the sand as if it already walked across her shore. For a moment, she wonders why there’s only one set of tracks instead of three, but it only makes her more curious. Without another thought, she follows them.
A sandhill crane can run faster than a human, but she can tell this one walked with a lazy, bobbing gait. If she walks fast enough, she’ll catch up to it in no time. She doesn’t feel any need to rush. Nobody comes out of their houses to stop her; she passes through backyard after backyard. The first yard is empty and overgrown. She doesn’t remember the name of the old woman who used to live there, but the house has been on the market since she died. None of her children wanted it. A realtor brought people over all the time at first, but no one seemed interested. She suspected that the old woman’s spirit was still in there even though the children sold all of the furniture. Nobody would want to live in a haunted house.
She walks past a dock where a young couple sits. Their legs hang over the edge, toes grazing the water. The man drapes his arm across the woman’s lap, and she leans into him, their bodies making an upside-down heart. He must say something funny because she laughs, throwing her head back and shaking her brown waves. They are too lost in their own love to notice her standing on their little beach, staring at them. When their lips press together, she leaves, returning her focus to the little footprints.
Another yard has a children’s playset, one of the cheap plastic ones with a slide and two swings. Not wanting to be seen, she stops at the shadowy edge of their yard, hoping that the sinking sun means the children playing will have to go inside soon. There are three of them, a brother and two sisters, running around. They scream in the happy way that only children can pull off as they chase each other around.
“I want to go high!” the smaller of the sisters says as she sits on the swing. She kicks her brother as he runs by and repeats herself. “I want to go high!”
He stops his circle around the playset and faces her, grabbing the chains where they meet the plastic seat. With three little pushes first – a count – he jogs backwards, pulling her with him, and then runs forward, shoving her body back far enough that he can slip between her splayed-out legs without getting kicked. Letting go, she flies forward, screeching with delight. The other sister stops at the crest of the slide to watch before going down.
“Okay, kiddos,” their mom says, drying her hands on a dish towel as she steps onto the grass. “Time to get ready for bed.” The trio groans, but reluctantly heads inside before having to be asked a second time.
With the yard now empty, she keeps walking. Dusk makes it difficult to see the prints, but she continues moving forward. She remembers the dishes waiting to be scrubbed but doesn’t once consider turning back.
For the second time that night, her thoughts drift to the dinner that her lover had enjoyed so much. It was the first meal that she cooked for him in this country, one that reminded her of home. She made sure it was ready the second he walked in the door, though he had to change out of his crisp blue uniform before he could sit down to eat.
There wasn’t any furniture in the house then, so they sat on the floor with their plates on a cardboard box that she hadn’t had time to unpack yet. His hair looked golden in the sunlight drifting through their big window, reminding her of the angel on the fountain in the backyard that had come with the house.
He was clumsy with the chopsticks; she tore apart the meat for him so he wouldn’t have to use his hands. He smiled, said, “Arigato, my love.” The walls were bare and their lives were in boxes, but it felt like home. No matter how many times she cooked the meal after that, the steak wasn’t quite as good, but he always said he loved it.
Lost in the memory, she trips on a root that has crept too far along the beach. She hits the sand, her face landing next to the footprints. When she stands, her clothes are dirty and her fingers feel a small cut on her chin. Her hair, however, is still perfect, without a single grain of sand disrupting the black strands. She doesn’t lose focus again.
The lake is still when she reaches the end of the footprints. Aloe leaves prick her ankles; she pays them no mind. There’s only an empty lot, no house. She faces the crane, its elegant neck curving so it can meet the gaze. Her lover stares back at her.