Tokyo Stirs: (Short Stories about Asia)

by Harmon Cooper

  Half of the perforated holes in the shower head are clogged and the water barely trickles out. She adjusts the pressure; the shower head begins spitting the water in little vomit-like bursts. It pelts her chest and cascades down her body. It mixes with the blood oozing from her freshly cut words. Her words. A new chapter is wrought and the book hasn’t even started.

  As she continues running water over her new wounds, she makes a pact with herself to only cut words that have meaning to her; to only cut words she has thought long and hard about.

  Girl lets the water run over her new wounds, watching the blood wash away. She touches the fresh cuts, feels the way her skin has opened small red valleys to accommodate the new words. She wishes that the letters were straighter, wishes she could carve in cursive, or Old English; the words look scribbled, but they were her first, and she’d get better. There would be more.

  Girl increases the temperature of the water.

  Her latte-colored skin turns cherry blossom pink. Blood falls like cherry blossoms in droplets, spreading in fractal patterns against the bottom of the bathtub. Her shampoo smells like cherry blossoms. She’s never actually seen a cherry blossom. If she saw a cherry blossom, she’d stick it in the space above her ear like a princess. She’d rub the blood red stigmas on her cheeks until they looked flushed. She’d have control.

  Steam has now filled the bathroom. Searing water hisses against her frail body. Girl lathers the soap onto her fingers until the soap is lodged under her bitten fingernails; she rubs the soap into her new wounds, pressing the word halfie until it stings. Feels good to do that. Feels horribly good.

  ‘Honey!’ she hears Mom call from outside the bathroom door. Girl jumps. The door handle jiggles open.

  ‘Mom!’

  ‘Dinner is—’

  ‘Mom!’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Mom screams as she sees the blood smeared from the toilet to the bathtub. ‘What the hell happened in here?!’

  ‘Close the door!’ Girl yells. She shoves her legs together, as if her Mom can see into the misty shower. Her face tightens; the broiling water no longer stings.

  Mom catches her breath, places her hand over her chest. Her eyes zero in on the blood-stained panties. ‘Oh, my little baby is growing up,’ she whispers, calming down immediately.

  Boy comes running. ‘What happened?’ he asks.

  ‘Your sister is starting her period.’ Mom shakes her head at the blood. ‘She’s made a little bit of a mess.’

  ‘Mom! Close the door!’ The sound of the pelleting water has become mocking laughter. Girl pulls her knees in tighter and screams.

  ‘Gross!’ Boy says, turning away.

  ‘Calm down, Sweetie. It’s not gross… it’s a fact of life,’ Mom says to Boy’s back. ‘You hit puberty a few years ago and now it’s your sister’s turn.’

  ‘It’s freaking gross,’ Boy says over his shoulder.

  ‘Close the door!’ Girl yells again. ‘Shithead!’

  ‘Hey! No cuss words! Honey, listen, I want you to clean the blood up, ok? And put a tampon in, ok? You know how to do it, right? Remember how I showed you? It can’t get stuck in there, so don’t worry.’

  ‘I know!’

  Mom steps into the bathroom and opens the cabinet door. ‘Ok, I put the tampons on the sink. Remember to sit on the toilet when you put it in, ok?’

  The water continues to beat against Girl’s knees.

  ‘Also, remember not to flush the tampon down the toilet when you finish with it. We already have that little leak under the sink; we don’t need another one. If you flush the tampon, the plumber will have to come out and that costs money.’

  ‘Ok!’

  ‘And how often do you change it?’

  ‘Every. Six. Hours. Mom. Please. Leave.’

  ‘All right already, don’t be snooty with me. I’m just trying to help. Listen, clean up and then come eat dinner with your brother and me.’

  ₪₪₪

  Glass Wings appears the same day that Girl starts her broken glass collection. His wings are small, made from multiple shards of glass. They are squamous and the tips are rimmed with dried blood. Rotten, blemish-ridden skin is stretched over his ribcage. His image is more or less a blurred line, torn at the edges and battered. His face is that of a vulture.

  Boy sees the monster, illuminated by the lights from the parking lot outside. Their room is always too bright, like an Alaskan summer. He watches as the repulsive monster hobbles into his room, legs scraping against the floor as his tiny wings ruffle and clink together like wind chimes. The hair on the back of Boy’s neck stands fully erect as a frisson of fear scissors through him.

  Boy checks to make sure his sister is still sleeping; she usually sleeps on her stomach with an arm hanging off the bed. He looks for Girl’s arm and sees it. Relieved, he turns back to the ghost, to the mangled monstrosity, to the most horrible thing he’s ever seen.

  Glass Wings.

  The wretched creature is admiring a piece of glass on their dresser with his back turned to Boy. Small slits cover the flesh of his back, oozing with blackened blood. His tiny wings pulsate slightly.

  ‘H-h-hello?’ Boy is trembling so hard the bed is shaking. His eyes are burning hot, his legs are numb, his nerves shot.

  Glass Wings turns to Boy holding the piece of glass from the dresser. He opens his mouth and a long black tongue rolls out. It curves in the air, falls onto the broken beer bottle. The tongue sluggishly wraps around the piece of glass. Like a syrupy lasso, it draws the glass in.

  Glass Wings swallows the piece in a single gulp.

  A harsh sound like paper ripping meets Boy’s ears. He pulls his blanket over his head after seeing a new piece of glass tear through the flesh of the creature’s scarred back. ‘W-what do you w-want?’ he whispers, peeking out from beneath the blanket.

  Girl stirs. She watches Boy whisper in the dark and wonders who he’s talking to. She sees her brother, his eyes torn apart with fear.

  Glass Wings shuffles out, his wings plinking against one another. Boy notices his calves as he leaves. They’re long and narrow, shaped like picks. He doesn’t have feet. Instead, he has two sharp points that carry his body like a pair of stilts.

  Who to tell? Boy falls backwards onto his mattress, stares up at the ceiling. Can’t tell anyone that you see ghosts, or whatever the hell they are. He rolls to his side and pulls his bony knees to his chest.

  ‘What did you see?’ Girl asks.

  He turns to her, catches the gleam of her eyes reflected from the light outside their window. She stares at her older brother without blinking.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Shut up and go to sleep.’

  ‘Be nice. I heard you talking.’

  ‘Hell no I wasn’t. Maybe you’re dreaming.’

  ‘I’ve seen you do it before…’ Girl’s voice has no tinge of mockery in it. Regardless, Boy feels defensive.

  ‘Seen me do what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Talk to ghosts, talk to thin air – something like that.’

  ‘It’s not true!’ He squeezes his eyes shut, forgetting what he has just seen. After all, it isn’t the first time he’s encountered things that aren’t really there.

  ‘I don’t care if you talk to ghosts,’ she says softly. ‘I won’t tell.’

  ‘Good, because there’s nothing to tell. Now leave me the hell alone. He turns his back to her, faces the wall. He clenches his fists, trying his hardest not to think of the monster he’s just seen.

  ‘You cuss more than Mom.’

  ‘Yeah? Well at least I’m not racist.’

  ‘So you’d marry a black girl?’

  ‘Of course I would,’ Boy says.

  ‘What about an Indian girl?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘A Mexican? What about a Mexican?’

  ‘Sure, your dad is Mexican, remember?’ Boy asks, turning back to her.

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘What? It’s true! You’re a halfie.’

  ‘I�
��m not a halfie!’ Girl sits up and throws her pillow at Boy.

  ‘Yes, you are. You’re half-Mexican, half-white. It’s not a bad thing.’ Boy immediately realizes he’s gone too far and begins to back pedal. He was only trying to poke her with a toothpick, not a dagger.

  ‘I hate you!’ she hisses. ‘I hate our stupid family.’

  ‘Hey, let me finish. What I meant to say was lots of famous people are of… um… of mixed racial heritages,’ Boy says, using the word from his social studies class. ‘You know, people like Mariah Carey, Chuck Norris, Tiger Woods. I think Prince is too.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Girl says.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry.’ He knows he shouldn’t have said the word. It’s her trigger point. He glances back to where Glass Wings was standing just moments ago and shudders. Let it go, deal with the matter at hand.

  Girl doesn’t say anything as she turns her back to him and faces the window. He can hear her sniffling, wants to go to her bed and hug her for a moment. A part of him wants to do that, to hold his sister and show her he’s sorry, but he can’t find the mettle to do so.

  Glass Wings comes to their bedroom every time Girl adds another piece to her collection. Boy never quite notices the correlation – he’s too terrified by the menacing haunt to contemplate cause and effect. He just lies there, watching as the hideous being swallows glass from the dresser. He also doesn’t speak to Glass Wings any longer in an attempt to avoid waking Girl. With each piece of broken glass the strange ghost swallows, his wings seem to grow in size. And every morning, just like the first time he visited, the piece of glass in question is back on the dresser unaltered.

  ₪₪₪

  Let us return then to the night that Girl has started her first period, which in actuality wasn’t her first period at all. The thought of her period disgusts Boy because having just turned eighteen, he’s still a virgin and curious to the point of terror regarding the female body. He still can’t believe how much blood was on the bathroom floor.

  The monstrosity appears that night after twelve, his clangorous wings as large as they’ve ever been, laboriously scraping against the floor as he shuffles across their shared bedroom. This night, however, Glass Wings doesn’t stop at the dresser – he stops directly in front of Girl’s bed.

  Boy pulls his knees to his chest when he realizes just how large the creature has become. He can smell the monster’s carrion breath; he can see the hollowness of his ghosty eye sockets. Decaying skin, menacing sneer. Glass Wings opens his mouth and jagged glass teeth sparkle in the dim light.

  ‘Get out of here!’ Boy hisses. He squeezes his knuckles together until they are white. Shallow breaths putter out of him. ‘G-g-go!’ He whisper-yells.

  Glass Wings ignores him and removes the covers from Girl’s body with his sharp claws. ‘Stop!’ he pleads, seeing his sister’s exposed body. She’s curled in a ball, her arms around a stuffed giraffe she still sleeps with.

  Glass Wings smacks his lips, lips covered in visible scars from consuming glass. The sound is loud and sickening, ravenous. His long serpent tongue flops out of his mouth. It drops onto the bed next to Girl’s legs. It rolls up her thin ankles, her bruised knees, and into her sleep shorts. It’s a quick gesture, it doesn’t take more than thirty seconds, and Boy is so stunned he can hardly blink.

  Glass Wings finishes licking at the inside of her thighs and throws his head back. His tongue rolls up like a yo-yo into his salivating mouth, flickers out once more to clean his lips.

  ‘What the h-h-hell do you want!?’ Boy whisper-growls. He tosses his covers off. He’s ready to do something, a little late because the ghost has already done the unthinkable. He stands to confront Glass Wings. The creature turns away without making eye contact.

  Boy bares his teeth and snarls, ‘Leave her alone you asshole!’

  ‘Who are you yelling at?’ Girl asks, yawning. The end of her yawn is a soft whistle.

  Glass Wings has completely vanished.

  ‘No one!’ Boy sits forcefully down onto his bed. The slats under the bed give way and the mattress sinks inward. The metal frame comes apart and the bed collapses. Girl laughs.

  ‘Shut up! It’s not funny!’

  ‘You’re so strange,’ she says. ‘First you’re talking in the middle of the night to no one, and now you’re getting all embarrassed about it.’

  Boy wants to tell her the truth; he wants to tell her a ghost with glass wings and picks for legs has just slipped its tongue under her sleep shorts. He wants to tell her about the Philly Ghost, and the others he’s seen, but he knows if he says that, he’ll be deemed crazy. She’ll tell Mom, and Mom will flip out. She’ll go on a long spiel about how he plays too many video games, or how he eats too much candy and reads too many comic books.

  ‘Go to sleep.’ He tries to fix his bed in the dark and gives up.

  ‘You can turn the light on,’ Girl says. ‘Fix your bed.’

  ‘I told you to go to sleep!’

  ‘You’re such a dick!’

  Boy knows he shouldn’t say anything – confessions of spectral sightings have no place in a world of webcams and peer review. What’s the worst that could happen? The worst would be Mom making him see a therapist. Since Mom can’t afford a therapist, Mom would likely contact someone from Huntington. His school would assign a social worker to the case, the counselor, or ignore it all together. Mom would ask him at dinner if he’s seen any ghosts and Girl, even with his ammo-word halfie, would have something to hold over him for the rest of his life.

  Boy settles into the lopsided mattress, half suspended in air by its frame. He pulls his blanket over his head and decides to make a test. He needs to wait for Glass Wings to come back; he needs to do something to stop the monster from ever touching his sister again.

  ₪₪₪

  Girl wakes up the morning after she’d first cut herself feeling alien and cold. Her brother is asleep on the mattress near her. The mattress is still detached from the bed frame, making it appear as if he’s sleeping on the side of a hill covered in blankets.

  She sticks her hand in her sleep shorts to rub her fingers along the puckered outlines of the two words she has carved, glass and halfie. She sits up and presses her heels together to get a better look. The words don’t look so good – they’re crooked and jagged around the edges, pink and inflamed. A razor would do better. She suddenly feels the urge to punish herself.

  Standing, she leans into the dresser mirror and notices six fresh pimples on her forehead. Using her tweezers, Girl pinches at the zits and watches white globs ooze out. The skin around each zit reddens and she squeezes harder. Her eyes water at the pain. She finishes, and is left with six bloody marks on her face. She’d never used tweezers before to pop a zit and is surprised at the pain. It’s a good pain though, a numbing pain like the burning between her legs last night in the shower.

  Mom calls them from the kitchen.

  ‘Coming!’ Girl yells in reply.

  ‘Damn, too early,’ her brother grumbles from his bed.

  ‘Same time as always. Rest well?’ she asks in a derisive tone.

  As soon as they sit down at the table, Mom starts in. ‘How’s your period?’ she asks. ‘Did you get the tampon in right?’

  ‘Barf,’ Boy says.

  ‘Mom, everything’s fine!’

  ‘And your face? What happened? It looks like a wasp stung you!’

  Boy puts his headphones in. ‘I’ve heard enough,’ he says.

  ‘No headphones at the table unless it’s Christian music,’ Mom says. Boy rolls his eyes and drops his headphones to the table.

  ‘So? Are you going to tell me what happened to your face?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing! Do we really need to talk about this right now?’

  ‘You know, popping our zits can lead to permanent scars. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Girl says with a slight grin on her face. ‘Maybe.’

  ₪₪₪

  A few days pass as they normally do �
� quickly, but slow enough to feel as if they are being dragged through a river of Vaseline. The words on her thighs heal and one evening, the urge to cut becomes unbearable. The desire strikes while Boy is tracing pictures out of comic books and Mom is in her bedroom sleeping. She’s been sleeping more and more lately, almost as if she is trying to whittle away her life through slumber.

  Mom might be the saddest creature Girl has ever seen. Getting closer to fifty and she’s rail-thin, her hair a drab gray. The skin on her face is porous and leathery, shrunken from too much coffee consumption and not enough water. The years of worrying and disappointment have pressed the wrinkles on her forehead together like a stack of sagging pancakes. Her green olive eyes have become black olive eyes and despite the fact that she’s skinny, her jowls have started their inevitable decline towards her clavicle.

  The Mexican blood in Girl, the same blood that dripped down her legs and pooled into the bathtub drain, has made her appearance rather different than that of her mother’s. Girl’s hair brownish-black. Her eyes wet wood brown. Her skin caramel in the winter and caramel with a splash of milk chocolate in the summer.

  She looks quite different than her brother, who has mom’s blondish brown hair, green eyes and a Nordic paleness that sits loosely over his bones in the winter and turns slightly buttermilk in the summer. He’s tall with flat cheeks and Girl is short with apple-cheeks. No idea where she got those and if she could sand them down, she would. Boy’s skin is flawless; she’s had zits since she was ten. Dark moles line her back like drops of ink from an alcoholic writer’s pen. The only thing she has in common with anyone in her family is her nose: long, thin and a little curved on the end.

  Girl’s in their bedroom, looking at her collection of glass on their dresser. The pieces huddled together resemble skyscrapers in a ruined city. It would be nice to be a sugar ant and have the ability to crawl over the jagged pieces. Her collection looks especially beautiful when reflected back from the mirror. Two cities divided by a river of reality.