flâneur

In the Grass – Guernica

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Those third and fourth nights, I cried and wailed. On the morning of the fifth day, my eyes were so swollen my father took one look at me and said, “Shiori, your face—it looks like the goldfish put a curse on you.”

I buried fourteen candles. With a small shovel that was starting to rust, I dug up the moist earth. In the vacant lot, about thirty steps from the way in, past the completely overgrown weeds—in summer they got as tall as me—there were several trees at the back. A magnolia tree. A camphor tree too. Those are the only two kinds of trees that I know. The rest of the trees in the cluster there, whatever kind they were, their branches stretched toward the sky and in fall, they dropped little acorns. The weeds thinned out a bit under the trees. I used the shovel to dig up the earth in this…

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