The Involuntary Sojourner by S.P. Tenhoff

Author:S.P. Tenhoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: best short stories, speculative fiction, magical realism, quick reads, book club recommendations, alice munro, collected stories, grotesque fiction, homesickness, ottessa moshfegh, short story collection, story collection, new fiction, dark fiction, grotesque, immigration, migration, existential crisis, weird fiction, loneliness, short fiction, edo period, borders, alienation, short stories, literary fiction, fiction, fiction books, long story short, short story collections, literature, realistic fiction books
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2019-11-04T15:12:42+00:00

***

Daiji stared at his phone’s empty square, his thumb poised above the keypad. Occasionally the thumb twitched nervously, but otherwise it didn’t move. He had started and erased two text messages. Now he couldn’t decide what to write. He couldn’t decide whether he should be writing anything at all.

When he checked his mail the morning after going to the club, he had expected a message from the Number One. In the past, when he gave a hostess his email address, she could always be counted on to compose for him a cute little text message right after she finished her shift, thanking him in a cryptic baby talk interspersed with the hearts and stars and smiley faces teenage girls put in as if in some new system of punctuation. But this time there was nothing. He waited another day. Nothing. He told himself he would wait one more day and then forget about her. She had said she would contact him; he may have been drunk, but he remembered that clearly. Still, she was Number One. Maybe she expected the customer to do the contacting. Maybe it was a kind of test. If so, what arrogance! What made her so different from the other women? The answer was simple: she was the most popular one in the club. If she had come to expect special treatment, there was nothing he could do about that. He either accommodated her, or . . . And if she was waiting for a message, he should send it soon. He had let three days slip by already. She might think he was rude. Or uninterested.

He went into the office bathroom and locked himself in a stall. Hello Reina. All right: but what next? It was best to keep it simple: just thank her for the other evening. He keyed in and immediately erased this message. The point was this: he was the customer. Shouldn’t she be thanking him? In his second message he asked her how she was; he said he was worried, since he hadn’t heard . . . No. It sounded angry and desperate.

His thumb twitched. He stared at the display.

He had been in here on the stool for too long; people would start to wonder what had happened to him. All right. His thumb came down onto the pad decisively. Hello Reina. Sorry to be so late in writing to you. Thank you for the other night. I had a wonderful time. I hope I can see you again. And without giving himself a chance to change his mind, he selected SEND.

Two days later she sent him a brief and very polite message thanking him for his email and for visiting the club. He read it five times, then sent a reply, thanking her for thanking him for his email, and asking if he might have the honor of inviting her to his table again the next time he visited the club. This time she answered almost immediately, telling him she was the one who would be honored.

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