(Translated from Japanese by Toshiya Kamei)
By the time I reached Ayutthaya Railway Station, my enthusiasm for wandering the world had waned considerably. It was now the fourth night since I left Japan.
The ruins and ancient Buddha statues failed …
The American looked tired. The paper band of airport codes wrapped around the handle of his luggage told of boarding at La Guardia and deplaning in Edinburgh. He had caught the local rail here, to Waverley station. He was unfamiliar …
My daughter has become a front line worker. She’s an OT (occupational therapist) at a rehab facility. Getting folks back on their feet after an injury or hospitalization, she teaches them to regain the old skills of dressing, feeding and …
We’d barely gotten through the cottage door before I felt Grandma’s claws digging into both shoulders. I hadn’t minded her grabbing me from behind like that when I was a kid. Her towering over me, hands on my shoulders, had …
I watch my grandson David varnish the deck. Sweat slides off his bronze neck and adds to the dark stain on his college t-shirt. It is a hot and sticky July afternoon. The maples and elms offer as much shade …
I ran into my neighbors, Diane and Trish, outside the metro. I hadn’t hit it off with Diane, but I liked Trish, and thought the feeling might be mutual. As we were talking, a guy on a scooter drove over …
The way parents search the instant they realize they’ve lost sight of their five-year-old in a crowded mall that’s how I scanned the steers gathered at the Tivio spring that evening. Dancer, ears peaked, nostrils flared seemed to be scouting …
“You’re late,” she says to him.
“You look great,” he says to her.
“Compliments will not save you.”
“I thought flattery would get me everywhere?”
He thinks back to the night they met.
“I suppose people change,” she says.
He …
Some of the guys feigned party animal personalities: shirts carefully disheveled, pretending to love beer, chest-bumping high fives when someone said something about a woman, any woman (likely not present, they’d be too afraid to say anything that might actually …