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

believe.”
    “I just don’t see why you have to rub it in my face every year that someone else got you pregnant and it was just an... inconvenience .”
    “A year or two isn’t long,” she said. “We should be more patient. It isn’t easy.”
    “You made a baby for him easily enough.”
    She walked out and wandered the streets for over an hour, fuming. Yet she could see his point, and that was what hurt the most. The doctor could find no explanationfor their difficulty. She wanted more than anything to be a mother, to bear his child, and no matter what the doctor said to the contrary, she still wondered if her abortion had hurt their chances.
    When she returned, his eyes were red. He apologized so sincerely that she gave in and told him they could stay home for the holiday. They went to bed after that, and though it appeared things had been resolved, a gap separated their futon, and they fell asleep before either moved to close the space.
    HEAVY POUNDING WOKE YUMIKO the next morning. The door, she realized groggily. She glanced at the clock as she threw on her robe: 8 a.m.
    “Mornin’.” A chubby man stood in the hall, humming under his breath. He looked inside as if waiting for the man of the house to appear. When he did not, the man shrugged and said, “Here for the toilet,” and stepped over the shoes heaped in the entranceway.
    Yumiko backed away, rubbing her eyes. “Um—”
    “New toilet’s going in,” he said. “Might be a few days.”
    “New toilet? I don’t believe we...”
    He stood in his boots, in her kitchen, and looked around.
    “Gyoza, yum!” He stalked over to the stove. “Do you mind?” he asked, his hand inches above the plate.
    “Oh! Yes, yes, please—eat up.”
    In the bedroom, Lou was half-awake.
    “Let’s go out of the house today,” she said.
    THEY WENT TO THE BEACH. It was uncomfortably warm already, and Lou’s hair puffed up in the humidity. They arrived early enough to get a prime spot, but Lou, as always, led her to a rocky corner near the breakwater. He was the kind of man that, given first choice of desserts, would choose the most undesirable one, just so he wouldn’t have to share it. He avoided crowds if at all possible. Once, when they’d first met, she’d asked him why he’d settled in such an overpopulated, and foreign, country. “To escape my family,” he’d joked, and when she pressed him seriously, he’d finally responded that he enjoyed the challenge. As she bobbed among the waves, studying him in his corner, she reflected that her husband seemed to enjoy a certain lack of challenge, as well.
    They’d met in one of her introductory ceramics classes. He was thirty-one; she twenty-seven. He was her worst student. It wasn’t that he didn’t listen; on the contrary, he hung on her every word. But his first project, a pinch pot, fell apart in the kiln, which she hadn’t seen happen in years. And the next one, the slab pot, simply wouldn’t stay together. Even though he used the exact amount of slurry she prescribed, the final wall wouldn’t attach.
    One night he stayed after class so she could fix his slab pot. “I’ve never seen anyone so bad at clay,” she teased. “Most people have at least some instinct for it. Humans have been doing this for thousands of years.” She tried to show him how to roll a thin coil and lightly press and weld it to the side slabs at the correct angle. He laughed and said, in stumbling Japanese, “I’m much better at eating. Do you want to have dinner?”
    They talked all night. Her English had been better than his Japanese, and still was, thanks to the two years after college she’d spent in Chicago, studying sculpture. When it turned out that neither of them actually lived in Tokyo, but an hour east and only four train stops apart, they called it fate. A year later, they got married and moved closer to the seaside, dingy as it was. They wanted their children to grow up smelling the ocean.
    The beach did get