flash fiction by dc restaino

Cleanse with Salt and Water

I follow Mother downstairs to the boiler room. She’s been shrinking her life to fit the space. The boiler consumes the far corner, limbs extending along two walls. I bow under the heat. She washes my hands in a bowl of water and turns me with sharp fingers. 

“It’s the biggest rock I found when I arrived.”

“It’s not a rock, Mama—“

“Kaa-san.” She beats her chest.

“Kaa-san,” I repeat. “It’s a cinder block.” It rests on a small table against the only bare wall; it’s wrapped in a thick rope Kaa-san brought from Japan. 

“No, it’s our yorishiro,” she corrects.

She corrects me even when I am right. 

*

We live above our laundromat on the edge of Chinatown. Father named it Good Day Laundry, unlike the others nearby and in J-town that are named after their owners. “Names are easier when they’re familiar,” he explained. Kaa-san says he insisted on naming me Hana for the same reason. My teacher pronounces the vowels long; Father sometimes says it the same way. Kaa-san keeps my name short and sharp like a blade, uses it whenever she can. I like being useful to her.

*

For school, Father makes me sandwiches with soft bread and a Coke. He spends his days bent, salting and scrubbing stained shirts and burning them white. 

Kaa-san takes me to J-town on the weekends. For lunch, she packs onigiri stuffed with umeboshi so sour my lips pucker. She promises I’ll learn to love the taste.

I ask Father how he fell in love with Kaa-san. He’s stooped over my bed; I remember him being taller. “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” he says. She haunted him. When they met, even the night seemed to embrace her. He’d never seen anyone so loved by the dark.

In the morning, I bow alongside Kaa-san in the boiler room. Her hair like lines of ink across her face. She’s sipping from a wooden box. I wrinkle at the smell reminding me of umeboshi. She’s more honest when she smells like this. When I share Father’s story, she screeches. 

“I was traded,” she explains—a deal between their families. She drains the wooden box, her neck contracting as liquid slices down her chin. 

*

My father doesn’t visit J-town. Kaa-san refuses to leave except to go there. She attends our yorishiro in the boiler room. “It would be lonely,” she says when Father tries to lure her upstairs. I bring dinner, accompany her in the damp heat. She conjures the shaded mountain forest where she used to play and the wild boar that gouged her neighbor’s wife and the shrine with the large yorishiro her family prayed at for generations. She always calls it home.

*

Father suggests I should make new friends. He grips my arms tight when I argue. The twist of my skin makes me nod. I sit with different kids at school. Setsuna and Tomiki are confused when I start avoiding them. Then, they’re gone, and it doesn’t matter. That’s what my father tries to convince me. 

*

I kneel beside a washing machine as my parents argue—Father at the top of the stairs and Kaa-san in the boiler room. Father goes silent, something he’s been doing since Kaa-san migrated underground. Her voice soars high and fierce like a nighthawk, and I smile, hearing her for what feels like the first time.

*

Kaa-san no longer speaks to Father. She remains perched before the yorishiro. She warbles as if the world bends with her words. I’m a clumsy echo, learning I can do the same.

*

The police are at home when I return from school. Father stands at the threshold. His back is a curved shell. What shocks me is Kaa-san; she’s outside, flanked by the officers. She’s wearing the kimono from her wedding photo, the sleeves draping to the ground like wings. Both my parents see me. Father juts his head out. “Hana. It’s OK,” he says the vowels long, like I’m still small and soft.

Father said that when I was born, Kaa-san was so happy she wept. I no longer believe him. She smiles like the waning moon as she’s led away.