Far-Darters
“Neko-aku, Neko-aku, Neko-akusume!” In bucket hat and roller skates, was the last time I saw Josie Tastumo.
We lived in Citrus Heights, near the unpaved park and Walgreens, where the affluent dumped their dogs during the 2008 recession. We liked it there; it was warm, damp, and cool. Earthworms spread their musk in the daily ration of sunshine. A man fell, drove his car, parked to the side and died there, once.
Josie and I are sisters. Our mother died fairly recently in our memory, but in terms of years, it was in 2001. I was old, older, and our aunts are no longer living.
So I took care of Josie. I sent her to school; packed the sandwiches, the extra clothes, picked out her rain boots with care. I went to the conferences and cooked dinner and worked 9-5 at the local in-unit store, just to make ends meet. We went to Church on Sundays; ate well on Saturdays. I liked it, I think. Some people would make the remark that I was wasting my 20s, and besides, didn’t we have an uncle in Japan?
Yes, we did. He lived in Takeshita prefecture, and he lived to gamble, smoke, and then gamble some more.
“It is not the place for a little girl,” I said, and that was that.
The 20s were made to be wasted, golden age, on lost opportunities and gold coins and all that. I thought I was one of the lucky ones because I was making the most of precious time, and I would hold Josie in my lap, and tell her I loved her so.
Then the man in the car came.
It was an accident. A heroin-addled freak, a boy, a little younger than me kept on driving. They do not know if he was high; evidently he had gotten sober, but anyway, he just kept on driving until finally his car petered out of gas, and he rested on the road.
When the cops checked his breath, he was already gone.
It happened right in front of our house, small, one-bedroom dwelling with orange trees and an unweeded lawn. Josie had been throwing her palms into cool patches of vetch and stork’s bill, ah, I thought, as the green-blue car rolled by. I thought he was just a menace, taking up our roads, driving badly, only to disappear behind the canopy of green-heavy trees.
They came, and then they went. Police cars, ambulances, a hysteric mother, the pastor father. They loaded his body in a sheeted gurney; tears fell on our chalk-dusty road.
“Is he dead?” Josie asked me then. At that time, I hadn’t really explained death to her; she didn’t fully get it. I tried when she was younger. All the books say that death is natural to little ones, we should never try to hide the truth and etc.
But she just, didn’t, get it. I told her our mother died of carotid cancer in the night and she said: No.
“No, she didn’t.” And earnestly, Josie would point to the trees. Skeletons tapping, fingers of oaky moss slamming against windowpanes in winter sun.
“See? She is right there.”
The doctors said that Josie had an overactive imagination, that it was fine for kids at that age to experiment and fabricate and say: I saw ghosts, I see ghosts, I see mommy crouching in the road. It wasn’t only that, though. Josie said that our aunties were peering down from Heaven at us, waiting to throw that ringed ladder down. She said the staircase upwards was lined with glass ropes and familiar variations, that our life was a number line, counting backwards, past 1.
“Precocious kid,” one psychiatrist told me, unhelpfully.
“She likes to dream.”
Our family had a predilection to dreams, (our mother died in a dream), but still it worried me. It doesn’t rain a lot in Citrus Heights, actually. It is not too cool in our town. But at night, when I pass from stage to stage, I hear the sound of stones drumming against the tiles. I see mother-mommy crouching in the closet, dark hair cluttered with asphalty gravel. She is not mad at us, I think; she only crouches.
And then in the morning, the house would be cool, and shadows would slumber across our lawn. It was as if we lived in a vernal marshland, slouching deep in the earth, singly unaware of the regular California sun.
Nightmares are common amongst us. But what was uncommon was after that day, Josie began to see the man who died. I did too, at times. It would be July, and I would be handing out popsicles to the neighbor kids, and Josie would point.
“Look-,” and already I felt it, the chill skillfully drawing my eyes to the back. At the road, the grey-green car was rolling, rolling, gently by. Whitebeam clouds would puff slowly in the distance. A blink, and he was gone.
“Look-,” it was October, and we were raking the leaves on our sparse lawn. The man lolls out of the car; I see him gasping on the street. I clutch Josie’s hand until bruises pop up like roses on the skin. She wanted to go, and I wouldn’t let her.
She grew angry at me. Furious. She was getting to that age where kids begin to question authority, push back, and the matter of the man was the scapegoat for that tendency.
“I just want to look,” she would seethe.
“What is the harm in looking?”
And I couldn’t tell her, except that some unpupated instinct told me no, no, no, do not go. I was 29 then, and fear was catching up to me, the misery of the golden years gone. 21, 22, 24, 26; those are the years where you are supposed to be afraid and miserable and lashing out at any random opportunity that befalls you.
But I didn’t have room to be afraid; I had to pack lunches and clean the house and do spreadsheets and pay our bills. Now, it struck me like a man, hitting the pavement, watching his head loll away.
I tried to lie to her, briefly. It didn’t work. It was nighttime and the trees were making a shadow forest on our walls.
“There is no man there,” I soothed, “none at all,” but this only made her angrier.
“There is! You see it too! He’s not mad, Sissy. He just wants help.”
After that, we had two months where we barely spoke at all, except to talk about middle school and homework and how-to-do-my-hair. The man kept rolling by us, every morning, falling from his car. I would drive Josie to school and pretend not to look; she would sit sullenly in the back, eyes averted, hatefully texting.
And then in February, when the cherry blossoms were in half-bloom, she changed. The doctors say it’s normal, moods at that age shift from variance to variance, especially before the onset of the first period, but still I was worried. She was happy, chatty, young. She wanted to wear pigtails to school, and for me to mend her favorite green overalls.
And Josie had become obsessed with this new computer game, collecting cats and feeding them in a yard. She always wanted a cat, but the same adult instinct told me no, and maturation made me verbalize it.
No, no, no, no, no. And Josie would smile sweetly at me, cheeks breaking with grin lines, and my heart would shudder. Something was wrong…but I didn’t know what it was.
I was being too harsh, I told myself. She won’t love me anymore if I am too harsh.
No, no, no, no, no. Is parenting a series of no-s, like an ascending stair? If I had to stack all that I ever knew, all that I know, nosed painstakingly from self-help books and doctors and teachers and friends, I would have had a mountain: contradictory, glassy, empty. Vague heat threatened to consume me. I got sick; I had the flu. I try to blame that for what happened next.
Because Josie was roller-skating, and she had an adult gleam in her eye, but I could not rouse myself from the couch. Through the window I watched her, blinds undone, but still I was blind to what happened next.
Because I did not focus on Josie at that moment. I heard her singing, singing, singing, humming the erudite little song. It never stopped. In fact, I still hear it sometimes, whistling through our paper-green walls. But what I saw was in the street, other-mommy was breathing, hacking, hitting the man with her fists. Her lips touched his; she was trying to do CPR.
The sunlight was so bright, so apparent, that I could not be mistaken as to what I saw. I knew the other parent was there. She looked at me, blackless life sharp with the void, and there was no hate there, no grief. She was just trying to help.
And I looked up and Josie was no longer there.
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About the Author
Yuna Kang is a queer, Korean-American writer based in Northern California. She has been published in journals such as Strange Horizons, Sinister Wisdom, and many more. They were also nominated for the 2022 Dwarf Stars Award. Visit their website at: https://kangyunak.wixsite.com/website.