Long after the baby has grown into a man, he sits on a bench in a park in Japan, ten thousand kilometers and thirty-nine years from Lubbock.
I was single, but really didn’t want to be, and as we were leaving a while later, a thought bubbled up from my subconscious. Wouldn’t it be something if I wound up with her?
There was no way to know who had left them or why. No way to know if the offerings had been made for children who had been saved, or lost, or perhaps hoped for by would-be parents.
So why would I choose not only to board the train when I don’t really need to, but also remain in my seat for at least one full trip around the loop?
The shutters came down, and the customers stopped coming, but life continued inside.
It is a season for the seaside and the mountain stream. A season for eating ice pops while walking over the blistering asphalt of country roads fringed with green foxtail, the green of which has begun to fade to brown.
It was just before Christmas and my friend and I were hanging out in Ikebukuro, an area on the north side of Tokyo. We had been wandering around aimlessly and were outside a convenience store when a man approached us.
There is a derelict house in my old neighborhood that surfaces in my dreams now and then. In reality, it is in Tokyo, boarded up and sitting behind a yard overgrown with tall grass.
Rainy season has come early this year, and so has my annual effort to catch up on my undeveloped film. I’m not sure how many rolls there are, but I’d guess about fifty rolls.
There are two kittens in the bushes. Both are striped, though the smaller one is half-covered with splotches of white fur, as if it had been interrupted partway through repainting.
© 2022 David R Munson, All rights reserved
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