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

believed in spiders’ rights. He also believed that life offered answers to those who stood still enough to hear them. As a young man in Kyoto, he’d worked as an assistant to a “talk doctor.” He became a skilled listener— so skilled that when the doctor passed away, his patients tried to visit with Nao. But Nao couldn’t afford rent on the Aoyama office. The business closed, and he left for a quieter place.
    EVERY TUESDAY AFTERNOON Nao carried a pair of yellow waders and a push broom to the fountain’s stone ledge. Feet snug in the boots, he stepped in, felt the pressure against his shins as the rubber resisted the cold water. When he lowered the broom head, a million tiny bubbles shot to the surface as if spooked. He swept. The broom handle was splintered, but he didn’t wear gloves; his palms were calloused and any slivers that managed to pierce the thick layer of skin didn’t get far; they stuck out like quills on a porcupine, and felt to him like a therapy.
    He’d been able to hear them since the beginning. There were commands: “Make her love me,” “Give me a raise”; and questions: “Can I have a new car?” Sometimes the coin clutched in his palm pleaded. Those were the ones that wrung his heart out, the ones that started with “Dear God,” or “Please, oh please....”
    The wishes came in seasons. In the autumn months, before entrance exams, there arrived a flurry from parents and students. Spring was for love, winter for family, summer for travel. The darkest time was Obon, when the wishes began to sound like confessions, and Nao knew the visiting spirits had come to cast their coins while they had the chance. The wishes of the dead were full of regret.
    Nao’s favorite coins to hear were the aluminum one-yens, so flimsy their sinking seemed magic. The voices of the one-yens were inevitably those of children, and the will of a child, Nao thought, was like a freshly minted sword. These were the wishes that cut him deepest, and pleased him most. He had long forgotten the ring of intense desire, to want nothing more than a fat, sugaredgumball. He visited the hundred-yen shop with a laundry list of trinkets: toy car, rubber stamp, throwaway camera. Things like these he bought and left on the ledge, like offerings.
    THOUGH HE COULD NOT PLACE HER VOICE, her coins had appeared every summer: thick, heavy 500-yen pieces, a week before the Obon festival, when spirits were said to cross the river between the living and the dead. The wish was always the same, and to his ears like a mantra: One more time. He wondered if it was one of these ancestral ghosts asking for another chance. But there was nothing he could do for ghosts.
    He always took this wish to the temple near his home, where he spent his weekends meditating and caring for the temple cats. He also took the extra-dark ones, the voices of pain, though these were few. Those voices usually found the temples on their own.
    Of the hundreds of coins he brought home, he made a study of them, cataloguing wishes and wishers the way an amateur gemologist might label rocks. No one lied in a wish. Might this be one way to truth? Along one wall of his house sat six Breem disinfectant canisters Nao had scrubbed out. Each canister had been labeled with a character: Love, Accomplishments, Health, Power, Money, Objects. Once in a while he combined two buckets in a philosophical conclusion: wasn’t a wish for an object simply a wish for the money with which to buy it? Wasn’t a Moneywish also one of Power? Eventually he decided that all were merely subcategories of the first.
    NAO WAS CONTENT WITH HIS LIFE, with his work and his television and his weekends at the temple. Though he kept to himself, he was known throughout town and that was enough for him, to be greeted by name, drawing no more attention than a streetlamp.
    He had planned to live out the rest of his days this way. But the news came that Old Castle Park was being dug up. The public preferred the