Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce Page A

beer ladies.” Lou’s last class of the week, Saturday night, was with a group of older housewives whose interest in English was a shallow cover for their real purpose: socializing away from home, where their newly retired husbands lurked underfoot.
    “Oh, by the way,” he called from the stairwell, “it’s brokEN. If the toilet were ‘ broke,’ that would mean it’s completely out of money. Not worth anything.”
    His footsteps faded. She opened the refrigerator and stared in. She couldn’t remember what it was she’d wanted.
    HER FIRST MARRIAGE HADN’T WORKED OUT. They’d married out of college, but then he couldn’t find a job, and she got pregnant and he still couldn’t find work, so they decided she would have an abortion. It wasn’t such a big deal. People had abortions all the time; the local clinic took same-day appointments. Afterward you visited a shrine and bought a jizo, a small cement figurine representing a soul that had not yet found its way to Earth. The statues stayed in the shrine, lined up like dolls in a department store. The priests blessed them every morning.
    Less than a year later, he’d come home from a temp job at a waste disposal plant and dropped the envelope from the travel agent on the table. He was going back to Okinawa, he said. He had family there. She felt many things, among them relief, as if some great disaster had been averted.
    THAT NIGHT, YUMIKO WOKE AT 3 A.M. and couldn’t get back to sleep. She went to the kitchen. First she chopped vegetables: cabbage, nira, green onion, garlic, ginger. She salted the cabbage and set it aside. Getting the dough right took time, and she added the water drop by drop—make it too wet, and the insides fell out. Her mother had told her once that the dough should feel like an earlobe. She poked and rolled and kneaded with her fingertips, palms, the backs of her hands. Sometimes she imagined it was an ear she was creating, part of an incomplete sculpture. She pressed the water from the cabbage and laid out small circles of dough upon which she arranged vegetables and morsels of pork with the fastidiousness of a surgeon. Then she folded the skin upon itself, crimped the edges together six times, and dropped the resulting crescent into a pan of hot sesame oil. The scream of the dumpling hitting the oil sometimes woke Lou, but tonight he slept on.
    She’d come to the kitchen the night before, and the night before that. Three nights in a row was a first.
    It was the season, perhaps. Last year the Obon holidays had been a week of parties, drinking with friends, karaoke and fried treats in the park. The final day, they’d attended a short ceremony at the shrine with her family, honored her dead grandparents by lighting incense, and, as an afterthought, said a prayer for the soul of Yumiko’s unborn baby. Afterward she and Lou had met up with friends and danced at a nightclub until the sun came up.
    This year, their friends were traveling, or had babies of their own. Her parents had moved back to her mother’shometown in Nagano. Lou had come home from work on edge that night, and they had argued again about how to spend the coming week. If they weren’t going to visit her parents, she wanted to do at least a couple of the traditional things she’d grown up doing: joining the crowds along the river, visiting the temple. It was a Japanese holiday, after all. She went along every year to Thanksgiving dinner at the International Center and pretended to like green bean casserole, didn’t she?
    But Lou had other ideas.
    “Can’t we go camping or something? Get some peace and quiet and skip the dead-celebrating thing? We don’t need to be thinking about the dead this year. Or at least, I don’t need to. You seemed to enjoy it fine last year at the shrine.”
    “Lou. It was never alive.”
    “What?”
    “It’s not dead. It was never alive.”
    He said nothing.
    “It’s just waiting for the right time. You know that’s what we