Etsuko had backed out the door slowly, silently closing the narrow seam. He had looked like a boy who had fallen, not a grown man at all. Twenty-five years old and Masayuki hadn’t married. He was a clerk in a fish store who spent his days scaling gills, chopping off heads and tails. Etsuko told herself, maybe it was time. She hadn’t expected the years to pass as they had. She had wanted to use the money to pay off the last of her husband’s debts, the ones he had inherited from his own father. “Tsune and I, we have nothing,” she told her son. Yellowed, the envelope still bore a stain from he cut flowers Etsuko had held during the funeral. When she offered it to Masayuki, she saw how his fingers wanted to pull the paper from her grasp. Still, she held on. “You borrow. You pay back.” Masayuki hadn’t even looked at her as he took the certificate: “Yes, of course I will.” He blinked, and she knew he was seeing cities on the mainland: Sacramento, maybe San Francisco or Seattle. Etsuko had known the words were empty. She grabbed one ear like the handle of a jug, as she had done when he was a child, and pulled his face close to her own. “Promise,” she insisted. Playing with the crumbs on her plate, Etsuko thought the frosting had been too sweet. It had been a moist white cake with bits of dried fruit scattered throughout. Tsune had cut the first big piece and placed it before Etsuko after she had blown out the candles. After four tries, everyone had laughed as she waved her napkin in the air to blow the smoke away. When Tsune’s husband asked her what she had wished for on her birthday, her daughter had to translate the question, and then Etsuko couldn’t seem to remember. The bright lights cast so many shadows. Voices chattered all around her until it all became a buzz, like a mosquito humming beside her ear. For a moment, she thought she was home, outside in the yard, just as the sun was going down. In the cooling day, there had been her bird of paradise to water, new ti leaf shoots to tie up. All that spoiled fruit fallen to the ground. Last night’s wind had broken another branch off the lichee tree. So old, it’s sad, she nodded to herself as she stepped around, fingers trailing over the bark. Masayuki would miss the shading leaves, Etsuko argued with herself. Reluctantly, she decided. In the shed is the hatchet: “Tomorrow, it all comes down.” 18
ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013 Sharon Hashimoto teaches at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Washington. Her short stories have appeared in North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Tampa Review, Shenandoah, THEMA and others. Her book of poetry is The Crane Wife, co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize and published by Story Line Press in 2003. She received a NEA creative writing fellowship for poetry in 1989. 19
- Page 2 and 3: Cover Art: “The Home Front" from
- Page 4 and 5: MISSION STATEMENT Kartika Review se
- Page 6 and 7: EDITORIAL Eugenia Leigh Dear Reader
- Page 8 and 9: Purvi Shah’s “Tree Risings” d
- Page 10 and 11: The Home Front Jordan Josafat 10
- Page 12 and 13: lip as she tried to swing her swoll
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- Page 20 and 21: SKIN DEEP Anu Kandikuppa To: Kinder
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- Page 24 and 25: must use a blend of oils and perfor
- Page 26 and 27: To: Ms. Clayton and Ms. Simpson Fro
- Page 28 and 29: To: General Manager, Crayona Compan
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- Page 32 and 33: THOUGHTS OF SINKING Kaitlin Solimin
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- Page 38 and 39: the next generation couldn’t best
- Page 40 and 41: Chenxi climbed up the silver ladder
- Page 42 and 43: she’d tried. She’d climbed to t
- Page 44 and 45: else. For now, this tall, slow Amer
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- Page 48 and 49: I’d read a newspaper article many
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- Page 52 and 53: Into the Wild 52
- Page 54 and 55: Runaway Train 54
- Page 56 and 57: PAROUSIA I Karen An-Hwei Lee Red bu
- Page 58 and 59: QUARANTINE Henry W. Leung My feet p
- Page 60 and 61: THE TRANSFUSION OF YUKIYO KANAHASHI
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- Page 64 and 65: Platonic knowledge is joyful recoll
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the story of how I began studying J
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Jackson Bliss earned his MFA from t
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piece suit nearest the air conditio
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AUTHOR INTERVIEW WITH MONIQUE TRUON
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suspect everyone in Saigon was conc
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KR: What is the physical act of wri
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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS FICTION Sharon Has
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ART 82 What The Jordan Josafat Jord
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Nonfiction Editor, Jennifer Derilo
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Kartika Review is a national Asian
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