The reporter bows, and we bow as well, all of us who are watching. We’ve sold all the onigiri, every grain of rice and crumb of seaweed eaten. Aki ran her slender fingers along the lip of the picnic basket, gathering up the furikake dust and licking it from her fingertips. Now there’s nothing to do but watch.
The reporter explains about the satellite, how all the resources have been gathered from across Japan, how the engineers have been working day and night, finding creative solutions to the things we lacked, using solar panels donated by citizens to meet the electrical needs. They talk about the lunches the locals donated, the wires repurposed, the huge amounts of fuel collected to power the rocket. We watch silently, but my heart is pounding in my chest. It’s time for the world to be as it was. I’m proud we’ve all been united in this cause. David stands near us, too. I wonder if he can follow the technical Japanese flowing rapidly from the reporter. I wonder if he understands the sacrifice the reporter’s talking of, how we’ve all worked together.
Five thousand silkworms, I think. Five thousand thousand. Five million million.
The reporter stands aside, and we all crane to look as the camera focuses on the rocket.
“That’s it,” Aki squeals, dancing from foot to foot like the swirling autumn wind. I feel as if I could reach my hand out and find the warm palm of Father’s hand, the delicate touch of Mother’s slender fingers. I curl my fingers, but there’s only the coolness of the breeze.
The rocket stands next to a tall black tower of crossed beams, like an airship ready to launch. I’m not sure which part of it is the satellite; it’s hard to tell. The team of engineers is lined up there, bowing, looking as if they too want to bounce from toe to toe. More talking, more encouragement to all of us, more appreciation for all of us making do and waiting patiently.
Then it’s time to count down.
My heart catches in my throat. Suddenly it’s happening too quickly. I’m not ready. I’ve always hated countdowns. There’s a sudden pressure, an expectation of something when you reach the end. Things are changing, time slipping through your fingers. You feel its finality, guilt and panic and terror. The time is going before your eyes. You can’t get it back.
“Ten,” they say. “Nine.”
The world feels unstable, like it’s shaking under my feet.
“Hachi, shichi . . .”
Aki is shouting with the rest, but I’m trembling, smoke and ash filling my nostrils. I might be drowning.
“Roku, go, shi!” Four. The number of death.
I remember something Grandfather told me, when I asked about the five thousand silkworms. “How do you care for all those moths?”
He ruffled my hair then, like David ruffling Aki’s. “Five thousand moths,” he said. His white eyebrows wriggled like worms. He sighed.
“San.”
“All their work would be undone, Koharu. It’s not that simple—”
“Ni!”
“What do you mean, Grandfather?” He’d hung his head. And then he’d answered.
“Ichi!”
“We boil them,” he said. “So they don’t break out of the cocoons and ruin the silk. We boil them alive.”
“Zero!”
The rocket flares to life, bright and hot and rumbling like five thousand screaming voices. It bursts upward as the cocoons bob on the surface, as the worms writhe and die, as half-formed wings melt and dissolve in the scalding water.
The crowd cheers, but the street girl sobs, rubbing her eyes with her dingy sleeve.
“It’s not so terrible, Koharu. A few moths are allowed to live. They’re born blind, their mouths so small they can never eat. They can’t even fly, not after so many years of captivity. They lay their eggs, starve, and die. Such a small life, such a brief moment. Which fate is worse for them?”
I don’t know which I hear first, the rocket bursting into flames or the crowd screaming. The fragments of the satellite splinter in the air like a twisted metal firework, raining down on the darkness of the launch pad. The hysteria rises around me like a wave, the screams and the explosions all become one.
Koharu.
My mother’s gentle calmness, like a crisp winter snow.
I need to get Aki home.
I grab her shaking shoulders, firmly guide her toward Tokyo Station as her body rattles with sobs, as she drowns in tears with the thousands of others, roiling in their cocoons. The silk is stained and torn; it’s missing a thread there, and there, and here, under the soft pale flesh of a young girl’s chin. It’s woven with the metallic blood-red of dreams and beliefs, the immortal thought that tomorrow will be the same as today and the day before. It’s stitched closed with denial.
They are fighting on the platforms, wailing and swinging fists and collapsing on each other like folding cards. The ocean of the world is drowned; no one is coming for us. Aki cries out in fear, but I’m beating my half-formed, melting wings. I push her into the train car before the doors close, pulling away from the chaos and shouts that crest over the shattered window panes of the past.
The streets are dark and silent in Kamakura. We step on tiny moth feet, pale as ghosts in the black of night. The picnic basket is light and easy to carry. My mother’s bones weigh less than a feather, and Aki has lost her bag among the chaos of the crowds. We stop to fill the basket full of water at the golf course. An old lady is there, scrubbing her laundry clean in the water trap. The fabric slides up and down in a rush of cold water and bubbles. Tomorrow Aki and I will go to the rice fields, swish our hands through the mud and pull up every forgotten grain we can find. We’ll slide our yen into piles on the kotatsu table and search the fish market for anyone who might still have seaweed to sell. We’ll stretch and snap the threads of our cocoons, flutter with tiny flightless wings, pinch with tiny open mouths. We’ll beat against a brief moment, before the autumn breeze carries us away like paper flowers, the first breath of snow crisp upon the tips of our noses.
Vanilla Rice
Angela Yuriko Smith
Meiko stared at the choices on the kiosk in front of her, hovered her finger over Caucasian and touched. New choices slid onto the screen. One hand cradled her rounded belly. With the other, she selected Blue eyes and then Blonde. She reached up to touch her own thick, straight hair. It was so dark that it shone blue in the sunlight. She hated it. Her daughter would not be so Asian. She selected Curly on a sub-menu. When she had finished making her selections, she slid in her stolen credit. A warning popped up on the screen.
The Attribute Chip is permanent and its removal may cause a breakdown in DNA. Please use the Attribute Chip sparingly and with caution. The Attribute Chip is a safe, effective way to manipulate native DNA for desired physical effects, but it is for appearance only. It is illegal to modify your chip to alter intelligence or other non-physical attributes. Once installed, it is advised to leave the Attribute Chip in place for the duration of the life span or risk DNA instability. To accept these risks, click and sign.
She bit her lip nervously, knowing what a DNA breakdown looked like. Two doors away in her building, there was a man with no nose. His flesh had destabilized and fallen off in gooey pieces. Just when his degeneration seemed finished, his skin would get gummy again, like fresh mochi, and he would hide in his apartment and order takeout for weeks. Sometimes, when she walked past his door, she imagined she heard him sobbing.
This wouldn’t happen to her daughter. She wouldn’t try to modify her chip for intelligence, an assumption she had for why her neighbour’s chip malfunction. She was no genetic engineer anyway. The physical attributes would be enough. Meiko had hidden herself in a neighbourhood where she blended in, but her daughter would stand out like an angel of light so bright it would illuminate even Meiko’s shadowed existence. Her daughter would have every suitor and marry a rich, kind man. Her daughter would be a princess like she had seen in cartoons.
Meiko hated her childhood. Cartoons had been an escape from a father who screamed instead of talked. His face
was always flushed red beneath thinning orange hair. By contrast, her mother had been a colourless shadow, cowering and almost nonexistent, —an internet purchase that her father had tried to return. Meiko had already been growing in her mother’s belly by then, making her mother non-refundable. Because of Meiko, her mother was defective.
She would sneak away to see the cartoons in the downstairs lobby, and the attendants would let her sit behind the counter and watch. Sometimes her father would call and ask if they had seen her leave the building, and the attendants always told him “no,” careful not to look at her when they lied. They hardly looked at her at all, but they let her hide and watch the cartoons on their television.
She never saw Asian princesses on television. The television princesses all had bright, wavy locks and pale skin. Her hair was just black and it hung straight as if gravity was trying to pull her into the ground. On TV, their eyes were always large, round and usually blue. No one she knew growing up had squinty, dark and small eyes like hers. “That’s how you know defective goods,” her father always said, “by the squinty eyes.” But that was in the past, and she had left all that behind. She hovered her finger over the “Accept” icon, hesitated, and then selected it. She scrawled her name.
The kiosk gave a friendly bell tone to let her know her payment had been accepted, and the image of a chip appeared on the screen. Small animated robots worked on the chip using old-fashioned screwdrivers and hammers. Congratulations! The words popped up on the screen. Your Attribute Chip is finished. Please have a professional install within 24 hours of your baby’s birth. Do not unseal you Attribute Chip until ready to install. There was a click, and a small plastic sleeve dropped into the tray in front of her. She carefully picked it up and held it to her heart.
Meiko hadn’t planned to have a baby, but when she found out she was having a daughter, she became obsessed with making her child everything she couldn’t be. She had grown up an olive-skinned alien in a world full of bright people with hair in all shades of red, gold, and chestnut. Her daughter would be one of them, the most beautiful of them all. Her princess daughter could open the doors of that world to Meiko. She smiled and tucked her chip away safely.
Three months later, she gave birth in a medical time-share cubical during her lunch hour. Meiko named her Katsue. The medical tech tried to change her mind about installing the Attribute Chip in her daughter, droning on about DNA risks, but Meiko couldn’t hear him. She was too busy dreaming about designing dresses for her tiny angel. No matter how he tried to caution her, Meiko just asked for the legals to sign. After signing, they wheeled her daughter away to install the chip while her genetic build was still malleable.
The baby was a disappointment at first sight. Meiko asked if the chip had malfunctioned. The baby she had given them had a thick shock of dark hair that stood straight out at all angles like kitten fuzz. The baby they returned was bald, pink, and ugly. They assured Meiko the chip had been properly installed and had synced to her baby’s native DNA perfectly. The baldness was a genetic side effect and would be replaced by the blonde ringlets she had requested.
“She will remain groggy for about a week but it’s normal,” said the medical tech. He wished her luck with a sigh before handing over her baby—her golden Katsue—still swaddled in sterile bindings; receipt and paperwork attached.
It took a full year for Katsue to actually become golden. Every morning, Meiko would rub the child’s scalp to see if the yellow fuzz would appear. When it finally did, Meiko would twist the sparse tufts of yellow into tiny bows to show them off. When she dropped off her daughter every morning before work, the caregivers would all vie to hold her and coo over the baby. She grew from the ugly, bald baby with pink skin into a bouncy toddler with blonde ringlet curls as a crown. As a toddler, Katsue stood out from all the other children and was always the centre of attention just as Meiko had hoped. The other children were fascinated by Katsue’s differences, but by the time they were adolescents entering their vocational training phase, being the centre of attention was not as pleasant.
Katsue’s body became awkward as she began her transition into a young woman. The other students grouped together, leaving Katsue and her ostentatious curls and bright blue eyes alone. They teased her and called her Vanilla Rice—white on the outside and yellow within. Friendless, she brought up her unhappiness to her mother, but Meiko brushed it off. Meiko told her daughter, “They are just jealous of your looks. Ignore them.”
“I don’t care if they’re jealous,” Katsue said during one of these discussions. “I still don’t have any friends.” Meiko’s answer was always the same. She held her princess daughter close and stroked her golden curls, taking pleasure in how they gleamed in the twilight.
“I don’t want to be different,” Katsue said, her face buried in Meiko’s arm, sobbing. “Why can’t we go where people look like me?”
“Because we need credit for that.” Meiko pulled her credit from her pocket and held it out. “That world costs, and this credit is almost empty! It takes all I can do just to have enough to feed us here.” She threw the credit on the floor next to her mattress. “And—I don’t belong there.” It came out as a whisper. Meiko wanted to say more, but she bit it short along with the memories that threatened to resurface.
“I want the chip out,” said Katsue.
Breath caught in the back of Meiko’s throat and stayed there, hiding.
“You can never take the chip out,” Meiko finally said. “You would become a monster.” The room had grown completely dark and only a faint gleam from the city lights bled through scratches in their painted window. Katsue sobbed again. Meiko tried to embrace her daughter, but she pushed away and groped through the dark to find her low bed against the wall.
“I’m already a monster,” she said. Her voice, rough with tears, snagged across Meiko’s heart and tore it. She said nothing and only lay down in her own bed. For the first time, she wondered if she had made the right choice for her daughter. Sleep came to her with a heavy tread that bruised her eyes.
Morning alarm exploded in Meiko’s ears. She looked across the room to see her daughter’s bed empty. She sat up and saw the curtain to the bathroom pulled open. Meiko was alone. Worry squirmed in her stomach and she reached for her phone.
“Where is Katsue?” she asked it. The screen lit up and a map of their apartment appeared. A pin dropped down where Katsue’s bed was outlined. Meiko rushed over to the bed and pulled the covers back. Katsue’s phone slid from beneath the pillow and dropped to her feet. She knelt, cradling it like she had held her daughter the night before and felt every bright and good thing in her life slipping away. Meiko buried her face into her daughter’s mattress and cried. There was no one to call for help. She had no family. Without money for the authorities, she could only pray and hope.
Meiko hadn’t left the apartment for three days when someone tapped hesitantly at the door. It opened a crack, and Katsue’s voice crept in softly. “Mother?”
Meiko opened the door, pulled Katsue through, and embraced her. They both cried. Katsue’s face was wrapped in a thin scarf, and Meiko hesitantly pulled it away. Her beautiful princess was gone. In her place was a girl with patchy skin that had a slick, damp look. Short tufts of black hair stuck out randomly from unexpected places like kitten fur. The blonde hair was mostly gone, and the remaining strands were caught in the sticky skin. Her eyes were patchwork also—flecks of blue and black pooled like warring factions.
“I had to do it,” Katsue said when she could speak.
“But we can’t fix this,” Meiko said. “I can’t undo this. Now you don’t belong in either world.” She held her hands against her daughter’s damp face and kissed her forehead. A strand of gold stuck to Meiko’s lips as she pulled away.
“I want to belong in my world, not someone else’s,” Katsue put her hands on her mother’s face, mimicking her. “No one loves a lie. Not really. I want to be real even if it’s not pretty.”
Meik
o had no reply. She could only hold her daughter close and think of all she had wasted by pinning her hopes up in shining, yellow hair.
Looking Up
S.B. Divya
Ayla clutches her tab with a trembling grip and reads the words again. She can hardly believe her eyes, but the blurring message on the screen doesn’t lie: she will be a passenger on the Mayflower expedition. Coming to Denver had been a good attempt at forgetting California, but Mars might be far enough to put her past to rest.
“Congratulations and welcome to the team! Let’s make history together,” the text says. “We commend you on being one of our most diverse candidates, proving that the Mayflower welcomes people of all backgrounds and abilities.”
Did they somehow measure and rank each passenger’s diversity quotient? Ayla sighs. Jeff is lounging next to her on the frayed yellow sofa, his silky black hair loose across his shoulders. They’re drinking a fifteen-year-old bottle of wine like there’s no tomorrow, and it hits Ayla that soon there won’t be any tomorrows. Not with aged wine. Not with her boyfriend.
“A penny for your thoughts, lovely lady?”
“What?” she says, quickly closing the message. “Sorry, I’m distracted. Work stuff.”
Jeff reaches over and strokes the unmarred side of her face. “Locking horns with Brian again?”
“Something like that.”
“You have to stop letting him push you around. He’s not going to respect you until you show him some balls.”
Ayla raises her eyebrows.
“You know what I mean,” Jeff says, half smiling.
“I do, but never mind,” she murmurs and kisses him, effectively ending the discussion. Even if this relationship can’t last much longer—and hers never do anyway—she wants to enjoy it while she can.
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