Nails and Eyes by Kaori Fujino

Author:Kaori Fujino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

When the bookseller showed up at the apartment, you thought it was a delivery of one of the things you had ordered online. I was back from preschool, drinking milk and eating rice crackers at the table. Because new things were being delivered all the time, you and I had both got used to the intercom buzzing. I paid no attention to it. My brain echoed with the deafening sounds of rice-cracker crunching and milk guzzling. You got up to see who it was.

There was no response when you spoke through the intercom. You pressed the button over and over until finally a voice called out—from directly outside our door. Your bookseller had slipped in through the locked entrance to the building when someone else was entering or leaving.

“Whoa, what? What’s going on?” you asked him. You had been ignoring the bookseller’s texts for a full month at this point. Even when a man did something egregious like this, you couldn’t bring yourself to use a cold tone of voice with him. “I mean… I’m sorry, but… when you suddenly show up like this… What should we do here? Wait just a bit,” you said. There was laughter in your voice.

You looked back at me. With a smile on your face, you rushed up to me, grabbed onto the back of my chair and pulled on it, tilting it forward as you did so. The back legs of the chair came off the floor a little bit. I stood up. Part of the fabric of my trousers had been puckered up, catching all of my rice-cracker crumbs; as I stood, they scattered onto the floor. More bits of rice cracker were stuck to my fingertips, stained brown from the crackers’ soy-sauce glaze. I was in the process of licking my fingers one by one. You put your hands on my shoulders and turned my body 180 degrees, so that you and I were face to face with one another. You pushed gently on both my shoulders, and I stepped backward from the pressure. You moved exactly that far forward to close the gap and keep on pushing. You were smiling the whole time. Even when I stumbled, you were unrelenting. Before I knew what was happening, you had pushed me all the way into the pink curtain.

I was still sucking on my fingers. They had been slathered with soy sauce, and the taste was just beginning to fade. Reaching over my shoulders, you groped through the curtains and opened the latch to the sliding glass doors. You nimbly slid open the door and gave my shoulders one last nudge. A blast of humid air clung to my skin. I looked up at you, and for the first time, I showed a sign of resistance. I stuck my left leg out behind me and planted my bare foot to brace myself, but it landed beyond the threshold of the balcony. You leaned down and lifted up my right foot, still on the floor inside the apartment, by the ankle, then released it.

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