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Late Blooming Girl

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Uncle Beard had no teeth, I was thinking. First of all, the reason he was called Uncle Beard was quite simple: he had a long white beard growing under his chin. The reason he was thought to be toothless was that he clucked his tongue like small drops of sudden rain hitting the roof, no matter what he ate. Uncle Beard, who was an elder brother of my grandma, ran a shoe shop on the edge of Tokyo. I was set to transfer to a new primary school that autumn and my grandma took me to the shop to have the school-designed one strap low heel shoes, pretty shoes so-called Mary Jane in the 1930s, made. Lovely leather shoes strolling could been seen through the display window, Oxfords, Derbys, marshmallow heel pumps, lace-up ankle boots, and knee-high boots. Even the flat shoes with corsages made by suede for little girls pretended to be prima donnas. In a faded poster of the 1966 tune These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, Nancy Sinatra laid sexy, holding Spotted Python to her breast. Uncle Beard showed me a leather sample book. There were a variety of animals, including cows, pigs, deer, etc. and even reptiles such as crocodiles and snakes. True or not, Uncle Beard told us proudly and exaggeratedly that once a year he went to the Amazon River and Río Orinoco to catch crocodiles. “Lunch is a crocodile dish,” Grandma called everyone from the main house at the back of the shop. On the kitchen table were dishes of chicken and white fish, which appeared to be cod, fried in used rapeseed oil. The plate was garnished with tartar sauce and cut lemon, with pickled olives and plastering a heap of French fries. I had lost my appetite.

Late that afternoon, Uncle Beard took me to a summer festival in the shopping district. Food booths lined the front of each shop in the arcade, I begged for grilled corn due to the temptation by the savoury aroma of soy sauce. We sat on a container of chilled bottled beer and nibbled on a whole corn together. I gazed at Uncle Beard’s mouth from motives of curiosity. When he opened his thin lips inside the bush of his long white beard, a reddish-black tongue glimpsed like a snake through the dark hole leading to his larynx. Then the teeth, which should not be there, especially the big front teeth, dropped the corn grains into his mouth like a bulldozer scraping sediment from a bedrock. The corn cores remained after being ground and eaten up by only his tongue rolled aimlessly away, lost in the footsteps of the festival crowd. ‘Do you want some watermelon?’ Uncle Beard said impatiently and brought two slices of watermelon out of eight equal portions into each hand, from the next booth. The droplets from the surface of watermelon, which had cooled in the icebox, evaporated in the heat of the pavement. I tried again to observe Uncle Beard, but his watermelon quickly disappeared into his long white beard. From a black hole, which might be his mouth, black seeds as small beetles jumped out vigorously one after another and died on the burnt pavement. The juice of watermelon spilled from his relax tongue stained his dry beard a pale pink.

There was a lottery at the exit of the shopping arcade. The Japanese lottery machine was a hexagonal rotating wooden box with plastic balls of about one centimetre in radius in various colours, red, blue, green, white, yellow, etc. The bettor turned a handle on the outside and the prize was determined by the colour of ball out. The first prize of the winner was a one-night trip for a couple to the hot-spring hotel in Hakone. “I hope we win the Fujiya Ryokan, where John & Yoko and Yukio Mishima used to stay,” said Uncle Beard dreamily as he stood in the queue. When it was our turn and I turned the handle of the machine in exchange for a redemption ticket, a white ball rolled out. The prize was a Hello Kitty perfume bottle-style keyring. The madam of the cosmetics shops in charge of the lottery said, “Congratulations, Kitty! you are lucky!” she smiled, hooked a ball chain on the tip of her glittery manicured forefinger and popped Hello Kitty into the palm of my hand. The liquid was noticed to be just water, coloured pink. Madame winked at Uncle Beard with her eyelashes like the wings of a swallowtail butterfly. “You should buy this girl a real perfume. Eau de Parfum named Ever Bloom would suit her. As you know, I work at a distributor of Shiseido Company. The shop is on the ground floor of the building on the corner back down this street. The next door of a book café. Do not forget!”

Even as the seasons passed, I could not adjust to my new primary school. I was a late-blooming girl who never pursued love or dreams. But I fell in love with a dreaming boy in my dream. I could only see his back in the distance. As I woke up from my dream, I was crying hugged the afterimage of his smile. I was listening to These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ on my pillow while eating an apple. Outside the window it was snowing. I thought of sexy alligator-skin boots strutting around town like a Nancy Sinatra song. I remembered the cute boy in the same class as me in the previous school. Although I had forgotten about the Hello Kitty keyring I won as prize on the day of the summer festival, and Eau de Parfum which Uncle Beard bought me. Even the scent of Ever Bloom might have remained in the back of my desk drawer, I cannot remember. I wondered if the truth or not that Uncle Beard was planning an adventure capturing black caiman and Orinoco crocodiles in Venezuela again next summer holidays. Above all, I could never forget the horrible scene, the little black creatures popped out from the dark hole inside his long white beard, then they died on the burnt pavement.

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RIContest #1: Late Blooming Girl / Hiromi Suzuki

© short story by hiromi suzuki, 2023

published in RIC Journal (May 29, 2023)

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via RIC Journal

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