Skip to main content

heiwa park

My father always warned me never to get involved with women. He said marriage was expensive and disappointing, and that love was flawed because love was never happy standing still. “Even a loyal dog will die on you,” he said. Our modest apartment was too small for a dog. My father was generally an unhappy man. When he passed away it was like a shrug in the darkness.

It was up to me to organize the funeral. Besides mother and myself, two officials from the company attended.

The most affordable place I could find for his remains was on the fourth floor of the Takichi Grave Apartments. His locker was three feet long, two feet wide and one foot high. It contained an urn with his ashes, his favourite suit, a pair of shoes, a newspaper and a tin of dessert cigars.

I continued living in our apartment. My mother cooked and cleaned for me, but in a way she now needed me more than I needed her, not only for my income as a computer programmer but for the occasional exchange of words, the semblance of company. Many times I considered being rid of her. My real friends were online, from the games and message boards that sustained me. I say they were real, but in another way they might as well have been phantoms.

In my favourite game I was a powerful dragon who incinerated whole villages.

My mother died seven years after my father. Her service was attended by myself and a neighbour. I threw her ashes into the sea; now my father would be free of her forever.

It was then that I discovered that my parents had been living a fiction. They were not poor at all. In fact, they had been needlessly efficient hoarders of money. I was quite rich.

It was a shock. I took some time off from work, just going for walks and thinking about what to do next.

I was a middle-aged man living alone in a coastal industrial city. Walking for any distance was something new for me, and for the first time I noticed that my home was a place where it seemed to rain every day. The sky was continually dismal. I thought about my life in the same context, how alienated and darkly opaque it had become. Despite my father’s advice, I knew I needed to find some form of companionship.

I quit my job, sold the apartment and moved to Nagoya. My new place was much more contemporary, with an electric fireplace and an impressive view. I filled it with nice things. I took pains to improve my personal appearance as well, learning about fashion and buying myself an appropriate wardrobe.
And then Yuki came into my life. The first time I saw her, through a window downtown, I knew that she had to be mine: hair pinned and topped with an Alice bow, knee-length dress with full sleeves, patterned tights, Mary Jane shoes, all in the deep charcoal grey of the Kuro Lolita style. She was the most elegant thing I had ever known.

Fashion became the centrepiece of our relationship. Shopping for Yuki filled whole weeks at a time. I could spend days hunting down the right accessory, especially the top hats and parasols. Yet her full, buoyant hair seemed perfect with everything, and with the right costume in the right light, she could be anyone from a Japanese Joan Bennett to a powdery white Theda Bera.

She was so photogenic. I was always taking her to the parks or shrines, and her outdoor pictures continually inspired admiring comments on the website I made just for her.

Still, no infatuation can last forever. Yuki’s beauty came from her youth, her newness, and she did not age well. Her hair turned stale and limp, and her sheen fell away. Buying her clothes began to feel like a chore. Where once I saw my love reflected back on me, now I would look into her eyes and see only blankness. What secrets was she hiding? She appeared helpless but then so had my parents. They had suppressed their wealth rather than share it with me. And then I thought about my father, who had warned me about romantic entanglements.

Finally I could stand it no longer. One night I took Yuki to our special place, the rock gardens at Heiwa Park. The drive was difficult. My eyes were ablaze with tears. But I knew what I had to do.

I doused her with gasoline and set her on fire. Her plastic skin shrivelled and shrank. I did not bother with the ashes. I just walked away. The stars in the sky continued to spin. Nothing had changed. The only one this mattered to was me.

Everything would be okay. The dragon emerges, the villages burn once again. Yuki had proved empty and unworthy so she had to be incinerated, because that’s what you do with bad dolls. I would not buy a new one. It was time for me to move on. To evolve. Now I would get a dog.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the indisputable weight of the ocean

People are always telling me that my work is too dark. So I've put up this sunnier story, but even it has a shadow, as its original publisher – a fine Atlantic Canadian literary magazine called the Gaspereau Review – is no longer in business. ---------------- It was a simple enough thing and that thing was simply this: Edmund Kelley was a gentleman. Of course his mom called him her 'little gentleman', as in 'Oh Edmund, you are my perfect little gentleman,' which did seem to hold to a certain logic that these type of things often follow, considering her affection for him and the fact that he was, after all, only ten years old. Still, Edmund himself was not particularly fond of the diminutive aspect of that title. Gentleman was enough; gentleman summed up the whole thing rather nicely, thank you. He was definitely a more refined version of your average child. He lived in a state of perpetual Sunday m

Oona Balloona (doesn't care about new tables)

Well, it's Friday, and since I'm pretty depleted in the chit-chat department, I might as well put up some pictures of Ol' Giggles At Ghosts before Grandma starts sending me hate mail. Man, what a goofball. At this rate it's going to be, like, eighteen years before she has gainful employment and moves out of the house. I mean, come on . * * * * * C is especially crazy and frantic today. About two months ago she decided that she no longer liked our dining room table (take that, dining room table! no more BFF for you!). Since then she's switched the dining room and kitchen table (and all the rest of the furniture in the house -- about thirty times, but that's another story) as a provisional solution while she scoured area stores for an upgrade. And she thought she had found one, on Wednesday, at JYSK ( Whatever , I said). But when she ordered it, JYSK called back to say that they were really low on stock, and that the stock they did have was damaged, and

some paintings to keep you company

  at the stations of seeing ; mixed media on cradled wood panel, 24 x 30 inches.   $350 local.     At the Stations of Seeing I expected something on the level of poetry moving the machinery within but instead it was wreckage and difficult instructions Recursive Procedures for Life Structures and that sort of thing. IF—THEN—ELSE where the option is optional CASE, which is multi-situational DO—WHILE the function is zero BREAK and LOOP again and again until failure. please CALL, if you can, or while you are still missed. . . . I went away for awhile, for various reasons, and now I am starting to come back. Where I finally end up is anyone's guess, but one of the stations on the path of that return is a willingness to sell my art again; this post is about just one of the larger paintings I currently have for sale for clients and customers in the Kingston area. A good place to start. The prices for these works are lower because the transaction is personal, easier — come by my stud