Free Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce Page A

getting too close to a hideous, wrinkly grandma will make her ugly and old, too.
    They leave the zoo. Father even springs for a taxi. As they stand on the street awaiting an available cab, a rat scrambles out of a trash bin and across Hana’s red sneakers. The child is inconsolable all the way home, and Father must bribe the taxi driver to bring them the entire way.
    The next day, it’s just as Hana expects: the pink, skinny, hairless tail sticks out just above the elastic on her underwear. She grits her teeth and summons contagion.
III.
    Hana has worked at the Asakusa Station Mister Donuts for three years.
    Sometimes, when business is slow, Hana calculates the number of possible destinations a person could attain with just two steps—the step on a train, and the one off. Thirty-five platforms, each servicing two or three lines, each line hitting ten to twenty stops, depending on the time of year, week, and day. But Hana only visits platform 23, where the brown line collects and deposits her daily, to and from the thin-walled apartment she shares with her parents.
    In the morning, the faces that place orders are alert, but by evening they sag, as if the population ages as the sun crosses the sky. But the next morning those expectant faces are back, ready for fresh fuel, slightly editedversions of the person they’d been the day before. Does she change, too? She feels no evidence of it. Sometimes she gets the sensation that time has frozen for her only, a glitch in relativity, as if she’s observing herself from a great distance.
    She arranges a tray of the store’s signature donut, a plain cake O with a baked-on handle for dipping in coffee. They have tails, she thinks.
    A man in a suit orders four donuts and slides the money over the counter atop a thick envelope. She makes change. When she looks up, he’s gone. He’s left not only his money, but the envelope too. She picks it up and out spill photographs—of her.
    She examines them, sharp corners pricking her palms. In each photo, she stands behind this very counter, wearing this red apron, hair tucked behind her ears as it is now.
    She twitches and slaps at her lower back; something has gotten into her waistband—a flea, maybe.

WISHER
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    THROUGH THE FOUNTAIN, Nao had come to feel like a father to the town. He thought himself something of a priest: a hearer of confessions, witness of desires. Buying fish, he pretended not to know about the affair of Shimoto-san’s husband, or that little Shungo Saeki longed to be a girl. Only one wisher evaded identification: a woman, her voice like a skipping stone.
    Most people just called it Old Castle Park, but as caretaker, he preferred the official name: Shuddering Galaxy Common Zone and Gardens. Rosebushes spiraled out from the central fountain like arms, the work of an idealistic planner after the war. Nao imagined each blossom a star.
    He had officially retired from the job years ago but had found himself restless without the routine of a day’s work, so a week into his retirement he simply came back, going about the routine that had kept him in motion for so long—tending the roses, sweeping the leaves from the path, scrubbing the fountain, and clearing out the coins from its bottom.
    The city warned Nao that they were unable to rehire him—red tape; he was too old to go back on the books— but if he really wanted to work, they could allow him as payment the change people threw into the fountain.
    He didn’t need the money. He lived alone and drew a modest pension and lived simply, in a small wooden house built so long ago it contained just one electrical outlet. Into the top socket was plugged his half-size refrigerator; the bottom socket sat empty. A tiny red spider sometimes appeared there, which Nao thought lucky. Nao owned a small TV and enjoyed certain weekly dramas enough to pay the NHK subscription fee, but rather than use the vacant socket to power the TV, he unplugged the refrigerator. Nao