Free Garden of Stones by Sophie Littlefield

diet—especially the Issei, those born in Japan—it was practically inedible. One of the first meals featured canned peaches over rice, a combination many could not force themselves to eat, to the consternation of the Caucasian cooks, who could not understand that to the Issei the combination was as incongruous as ketchup on cake.
    There was also the matter of vaccinations. Everyone was required to receive a typhoid vaccine. Done assembly-line style, the dosages given the children were so high that many were sick and feverish for days. Lucy lay in her cot, fading in and out of awareness, while her mother made repeated trips to the latrine to dampen a cloth for her forehead.
    Every few days, a dust storm would pummel the camp. Fine grains swept through the cracks that had formed between the floorboards as they’d cured, and came in through the rough window casings and the gaps between the roof and timbers. The dust was cagey and relentless, and the evacuees scrambled to beat it back, stuffing the cracks with straw and strips torn from rags and anything else they could find. The more enterprising took to nailing lids from food cans in overlapping rows over the cracks. But these measures seemed only to renew the storm’s efforts to find them. The fine grains felt like boulders when they found their way into one’s eyes; they were gritty in one’s teeth, sandy in one’s ears and nostrils.
    At night the sound of coughing filled Lucy’s building. Everyone struggled to breathe, from the baby in the next room, whose condition was worsening by the day—her mother waited outside the temporary hospital most mornings to beg the harried doctors for medicine—to the old man at the other end of the hall who sounded like furniture being roughly pushed across a floor.
    But by far, the worst of the privations was the public latrine.
    On the morning after their arrival, Miyako took Lucy’s hand and they ventured out of the barrack. There were sounds of conversation up and down the row of rooms, but Miyako waited until she was sure no one else was in the hall before they left their own room.
    “I will not meet my new neighbors before I have had a chance to freshen up,” she vowed fiercely, gripping Lucy’s hand so tightly that it hurt. She had a folded cloth, their toothbrushes, a comb and a tiny cake of soap in a small box that she’d had the foresight to bring for that purpose, and she had wrapped a scarf around her head and donned her dark sunglasses. Privately, Lucy thought she looked even more like a movie star in this getup, but she doubted her mother would take the observation as a compliment.
    They walked the short distance to the latrine with sand blowing up under their skirts. The dust storm of the night before had settled, but sand still blew and the wind was cold on their faces. Though it was late March, the temperature had fallen below freezing the night before, and there was a rime of ice on a puddle leaking from the plumbing pipes leading into the latrine.
    And there was a line. As they got close, they heard the intense, agitated conversation among the women already waiting.
    “Wait, suzume, ” Miyako murmured, holding Lucy back. Lucy knew her mother was loath to intrude on others’ conversation; her reticence was more imperious than shy, but she was not a naturally outgoing person. This was a subject to which Lucy had already devoted a fair amount of worry: how would her mother make friends here, if in all their time on Clement Street she’d made only one? Yesterday, after they were processed at the main office, they discovered that Aiko would be living far from their block, nearly three quarters of a mile away, sharing a room with an elderly woman and her unmarried grown daughter. The entire camp was a square mile with thirty-six blocks, and they said that ten thousand people would be living there by summer. Lucy was afraid they would never see Aiko. If her mother did not make new friends, she would be all