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“I discovered her after a boasting tourna home a man who successfully claimed to have made love to every woman in a certain prefecture and left a different flower in each of their navels He was so drunk he tried to seduceas bright as the pole star I wanted to blow her out I wanted to eat her I wanted her to exist in me forever She looked at nized immediately that we could so easily annihilate one another with the softest breath, the uish her, and she could burn aze and ran”

“Obviously, you becaht then, before she could strike?”

Futsukeshibaba shakes her head The smoke of her hair wisps

“That is a huame We fell in love”

MILK

A summer moon sits heavy as a hand on Tokyo Bay Cicadas shriek at it, but it does not answer It oes unheard The naval officers on watch suffer under it but have no name for it

The wo the streets of Yoshikura does not hear it She hears the cicadas, theirin her brain She hears doors open and shut She hears her own steps and the buzz of vendingin the dark She is not a Japanese woman The machines anchor her neorld They tell her where she is—she lives suddenly in a place without nuns to tell her what a road is called or what the addresses of the housesmachine closest to home has hot and cold coffee cans, a e bottles of leer bottles, and she clings to this For her, Japan is a series of sigils: a liter bottle of brown tea hborhood has kanji that look to her like a princess’s ball gown, a running dog, and the bars of a jail But she has already reat deal of khaki, who says that she takes that salasses, a typewriter, and the pillars of a country house She told the other wife: For foreigners, Japan is a Rorschach painting The blonde gave her a strange look and turned around to have a different conversation with the Captain’s wife The wives call each other by their husbands’ ranks and their husbands’ surnah, without them there, they speak with their husbands’ mouths

She walks up—everything is up here The houses terrace up through the hills, one on top of the other, like stacking bowls Sheher path like a thread t

hrough a labyrinth Green water bottles, candy, Coca-Cola products The house she lives in now has another house inside it As though it is pregnant As though it is alive The other house is meant for in-laws, closed up behind screens with snowy pines and serene partridges painted on the roo behind a clutch of partridge eggs, a second master bedroom, a second office It unnerves her It see But she has nothing but herself It is the nature of a naval officer to be absent That is the kind of creature he is When he sees a hos to leave it She loves him, she thinks, because he can destroy her

She does not yet knohat kind of creature she is She is very young Right now, she is a creature that interprets sigils, assigns the until she can learn the public one She is a creature walking at night in a green dress The train goes by on elevated tracks sootperson But it’s not i to be She is as alone as she has ever been She isn’t married to a person She is er to her To a house inside a house

The woman turns the corner and stops short Before her, a white tunnel opens up in the o nowhere and it seehts fill up frosted plastic walls Panels here and there have gone out, leaving long rectangles of black, lightless space Bike paths line either side of the road through the tunnel Electric green spiders spool down fro as they spin She does not understand the tunnel She does not have an explanation for it She does not even know if she wants to go into it, to see where it goes Like everything else, it is a sigil

INK

Tsuma and Kyorinrin are lovers

When they have been at each other, Kyorinrin must bathe a second time before sunrise Once after his story, and once after hisand s sloppier as the night wears on The characters are still hen Kyorinrin washes them away Wet and black and rimmed with another color, the color of raisins, the color of her love

In the e and deep and all violet, all glow It is the ? of her climax It is a secret ? only Kyorinrin knows He looks at it a long time before he rinses it clear It makes him think of new stories Iton his parchment body like a detonation