The Electrical Field by Kerri Sakamoto Page B

dining-room table, where my notebook lay open. I felt the springy thickening of its rippling pages, a living thing in my hands as I closed it and replaced it in the bottom cabinet drawer.
    The ceiling quaked from Stum pacing upstairs. After a while he settled down. I heard the toilet flush in the bathroom, the rush of water through the pipes across the ceiling. I sighed, glancing at Eiji’s portrait again, unmoved from its spot on the end table. I sat down beside it. I know, I thought. No one but myself to blame. Indulging Stum like the baby he has always been, looking after every little thing all these years. As I would do for Sachi, if she’d let me.
    I heard the rush of water close, almost inside me. I was riding Eiji as before, playing seahorse in the ocean at Port Dover, holding on. He swam in the black water, arms knifing in and out. Too tight, he cried, throwing back his head. I was holding him too tight, my hands a crab at his neck; we began to sink, both of us, my hair tangling dark under our mouths.
We won’t die, we won’t
, I whispered to myself. The air was prickly on my skin, there was the strange slapping noise,our flesh, the only sound. The shore was far away, where logs, Papa’s logs that he stood on and rolled by the mill, floated like broken-off fingers. I dipped down into the dark then, inside a glass jar, and I saw the sun dropping into the shore, the fingers drifting away. Eiji kicked and kicked without making a sound and we came up at last, water shattering over our heads. We rode on a wave and tumbled ashore, my crab hands never letting go.
Nii-san, nii-san
, I was calling, holding onto my big brother, my strong big brother.
    “Ne-san, ne-san!” My eyes flickered open. What? What? It was Stum, Stum shaking me, gripping my wrists, twisting as if I were dangerous. What was wrong with him? I saw myself caught again in his eyes, grey and fallen. I sat up. “What?” I said again, the word blurring on my lips. Stum’s pyjamas were rumpled, as if he’d been roused from sleep himself.
    “What is it?” I repeated, bleating in my own ears, catching up. We were still, arms locked. His hands were warm and moist on the undersides of my forearms. “It was a dream. A dream, that’s all,” I muttered, just realizing it myself. Stum looked startled. As if it were beyond him to fathom that I might dream, that there were things unspeakable by day. I struggled from his grasp.
    “Abunai!” he cried, pointing with his eyes to my lap. There was a noise, a tinkling. “Abunai! Watch!” He released my arms and stepped back. I looked down to find Eiji’s portrait in my lap, the glass broken, jagged, in pieces in the lamplight.

THREE
    A FTER I CLEANED UP the stray bits of glass, I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I switched on the light and faced myself in the mirror, just like that. For the first time in a long while, more than a glance to make sure there was no mess. Tonight I saw the skin at my temples thinned and veined with my bitter thoughts. Mottling there and under my eyes, even across my hands.
    As a young girl I stared in the mirror for hours and never got on with things. When I saw my short nose growing wide across my face, I pinched and pinched to stop it. I knotted strips of rags around my knees at night to make them grow straight instead of bowed like Mama’s.
    I watched Eiji change in a way that made me lonely. I told myself it was because they made us leave Port Dover, leave Vancouver Island; it was because they sent us to the camps in the mountains and we’d had to leave the oceanbehind. But it wasn’t just that. I remember the moment when I knew. It was a small thing, really, when he turned to someone else and not to me, even when I called for him. It was like summer turning to fall, a sudden creeping chill.
    In the next room I heard Stum rummaging around again, knocking up against the wall, then finally settling down. I turned off the light and came down the stairs. I saw a