Kirsten's Fiction Notebook

  I couldn’t tell if Pill was actually asleep or just lying there. She was curled up in the dog bed, her face covered with a blanket, and she was holding my wrist with her hot fingers. She twitched and squirmed and whimpered sometimes, but otherwise she was motionless in a way I’d never seen her. I kept asking Yukiko if we should take her to the hospital, but she insisted we wait until tomorrow. Going to a hospital might traumatize her all over again, and her neighbor, who was a doctor, said it was best to keep her where she was stable.  But there was a gaping wound in her somewhere, bleeding out. I was sure of it. And I was doing nothing about it. Every now and then Yukiko appeared beside me to ask if I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten that day because it was impossible–even the smell of food turned my stomach. So I said no thanks, and she would frown, and then she’d bring me a glass of water and insist I drink it, and while I did, she would sit and talk to me, mostly about herself...

Yukiko had dreamed she was holding a bag of persimmons, a sweet, lumpy armful, bestowed on her by a devious woodsprite. The woodsprite had cast a spell on the persimmons, and if Yukiko ate one, she would be forced to live in the woodsprite’s cave behind the waterfall, at the base of a Mizuyama. Still she wanted badly to eat a persimmon, to savor the delicate flesh as she used to when she was a girl, when she would lie in the grass under the persimmon tree behind the summer cabin, the sky growing dark, the stars beginning to show, and the voices of her parents drifting out through the screened windows.                 But she was holding a pillow, not a bag of persimmons. At 4:32 in the morning, according to the green numbers floating in the dark. Her new wake-up time, for whatever reason. Insomnia was the latest onslaught.  She had tried sleeping pills and herbal remedies, had tried drinking alcohol and not drinking, had given up co...

Darius was jogging side-to-side in the shadows of the backstage area, and I was peeking through a gap in the curtains, watching the crowd. There were more men than women, and they all looked the same to me, guys with dark beards and tattoos and black t-shirts that showed off their muscles. They held bottles of beer loosely with just two fingers, swinging the bottles up to their lips, drinking, doing all this with a kind of ease and grace that to me looked very masculine. There were also families with young kids, and an older woman in checked pants pulling along a tall spindly man, her son, I’m guessing. His arms were clenched against his torso and he walked with a sideways, halting limp that looked painful, and I wondered if this was the best thing for him, this chaotic environment. But as he turned to spot his chair, I could see he was smiling, and the woman was, too. Her face looked like a kid’s, all lit up with anticipation.  “Sam, you got to move your body or you gonna get inju...