Kartika_Issue15

A SHADOWED SEASON
Sharon Hashimoto
ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
Etsuko could still count, but she needed to keep track with her fingers.
Sometimes she was distracted by the age spots and broken cuticles. Did it
really matter if ninety-six came after ninety-eight? She’d been waiting so
long for Masayuki’s return that the numbers didn’t really seem to matter.
Mostly, it was just a way to pass the hours. Hard enough to know the day of
the week and when to expect her daughter’s visit.
Etsuko was losing her English words syllable by syllable. When she spoke, it
was in choppy simple sentences. Bumbye, she counseled herself. Just wait.
Once in a while she could trick herself into remembering. What was she
supposed to do, what was she supposed to say to get somebody’s attention?
The white people who ran around in brightly colored scrubs were so rushed
and busy. They would stare at her, watching her lips, then wrinkle their own
eyebrows. Last night, there’d been the nurse who just frowned, shook her
head and walked away. I’ll count to one hundred to give them a chance,
Etsuko reasoned.
There was a time when she could sniff the air, feeling the hot sun on her
shoulders and know that she would soon be harvesting the papayas and figs
in the yard. At her house, mounded globes of lichee nuts would litter the
ground. Such a small tree, but with so many limbs bending with the fruit.
How Masayuki loved their sweet white flesh, piling high the shiny almondshaped
seeds. How she warned the boy not to eat so much. All he knew was
that lichee nuts tasted good on his tongue, cooling in all the hot Hawai’i sun.
She shivered. In this air-conditioned place, her body was forgetting the shift
of seasons, when her joints would ache and grind with the threat of rain. The
mustachioed man in the navy suit on the TV news station always spoke in
the same tone of voice even though there were pictures of plane crashes or
yellow suns with the day’s expected high temperature. “Thank-you, may
I…”—the polite terms she once used were slipping away. Mostly Etsuko
grunted when the Nurse’s Aide asked if she needed to use the toilet. They
always pinched her elbow when she struggled with her walker down the hall.
This morning when she woke up, snapping her neck to one side, she had
been surprised by the sight of her arms lying like two old branches against
the white sheets. She wanted to pop the kink out of her shoulder from
sleeping on a too-soft mattress. The Japanese block pillow that held the
shape of her neck was gone. Instead she found herself in a high twin bed
with a metal guard rail to keep her from falling out. She had to bite her lower
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