Namakemono by Kelly Murashige
Kaede feels estranged from humanity, but considers whether she could attract a mate.
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According to the internet, there are two genera of sloths: those with three digits on each forelimb, called three-toed or three-fingered sloths; and those with only two digits on each forelimb, called two-toed or two-fingered sloths.
Why toes and fingers are considered interchangeable, Kaede has no idea. A toe is not a finger. She cannot type with her toes. She has, however, seen videos of a very talented artist who, after losing her arms, became very adept at using her toes to hold a paintbrush. Kaede could spend the rest of her life studying art, with the full use of her hands, and still never create anything of worth.
Something else about sloths: When a female sloth enters heat, rather than searching for a mate herself, she simply sits in a tree and screams until a male finds her.
This scream is not dramatic. It is not hysterical. It is straight to the point, as if to say, I would like to get this over with, and most times, it works perfectly. Males lift their heads and start searching for her.
It would be nice if Kaede could attract a mate that way. If she could be the kind of girl who shows up at a bar, orders herself a fruity drink, and waits for someone to approach her and pay her tab.
I've never had a cosmopolitan, she imagines her new suitor saying, so I'll have to live vicariously.
She would not invite him to have a small sip. She would never let a stranger contaminate her drink. How unsanitary. An open invitation to all germs.
Perhaps it doesn't matter. She's not the type to go to bars. Nor is she the type that most boys like. It would be easier, she thinks, if men were just a little more desperate, or else if she had been born a sloth.
She studies her fingers for a moment, her eyes narrowing. If she chopped off two fingers from each hand, would she get any closer to becoming a sloth?
When she stretches out a hand, her fingers tremble. There are a multitude of reasons why she never could have been a surgeon, including but not limited to the fact that she throws up at the sight of blood, but the tremor in her hands is one of the most heartbreaking. She prides herself on being steady in most aspects of life. If only her body didn't betray her so.
She lowers her hand and buries it between her knees.
On second thought, it is possible that she would only need to remove one finger from each hand. Perhaps the pinkie. She remembers reading somewhere that a thumb is not a finger.
Of course, sloths don't have thumbs. Perhaps she would have to lop those off as well. Two pinkies. Two thumbs. Six fingers remaining.
Would she rather remove her toes? That seems less troublesome. She was never all that good at walking anyhow. As a child, she struggled in PE, missing baskets by a mile and tripping over her own feet.
Some of the worst days of her middle-school life were when the girls and boys were set to the run the mile at the same time. Watching the most athletic girls easily lap her had been humiliating enough. Knowing boys could stare at her, could watch the fat on her thighs jiggle more than her still-flat chest, could laugh at her sweaty temples and flushed cheeks and poor form, made her wish she could take off from the starting line and run into another life. One in which she did not have a brain and body she despised.
She is thirty now, and instead of spending her afternoons suffering in PE, she is suffering at home, lying in bed and learning about animals she wished she could have been born as instead.
She has learned on the internet that sloth copulation is quick. From start to finish, it takes a minute, if that.
Maybe she would like that. If it were over that quickly. Maybe then, she wouldn't worry. Maybe then, it would be fun.
Preparing to pull herself out of bed, she swings one leg out from under her blanket. Then, after a pause, she snuggles back in. It's barely five o'clock. No one goes to bars this early. Not if they're only looking for a temporary mate.
The edge of her blanket is soft against her chin. She takes out her phone and continues reading. Apparently, after mating, once the male falls asleep, other males may emerge and approach the waiting female. It is up to her to determine if she wants to mate again. Most times, she will, for the sake of survival.
Yet she is a sloth. She must get tired of it all. Perhaps there are times when she would rather sleep.
Setting down her phone, Kaede buries her face in her pillow. She always rests best when it's hard to breathe.
She can't recall if Curtis is his first or last name, but it hardly seems to matter. She hates it either way.
It serves her right, she supposes. Of course she gets a Curtis. She shouldn't have expected anything better on her first attempt at doing as the female sloths do.
At least it didn't take as long as it does in the wild. Female sloths will call out to mates for eight to ten days each month. These calls grow more frequent as time goes on. By the end, she is screeching every ten to fifteen minutes.
In the dim bar called forSAKEn, a pun on the Japanese word for alcohol, Kaede needed only approximately ten minutes. This is impressive for both sloths and people.
Now home, the hand of this Curtis smashes its way up her torso, as if Kaede is not a woman, or even a sloth, but a tree. One he is climbing rather recklessly.
"Ah," she says.
"Yeah," he grunts. "You like that, don't you?"
She doesn't. That ah was one of pain and slight distress, the same sort of sound she makes after accidentally dropping an ice cube on her foot.
She stares at her wall. The pattern reminds her of oil on water. It's incredibly ugly. She would never repaint.
Technically, she can't. She would have to ask the owner first. She has spoken to them once and has never met them in person.
She likes this. The anonymity is the best part of their relationship.
She wishes she could have maintained the same anonymity with Curtis. She wonders if sloths bother learning their mates' names.
Do sloths have names? She thinks they must. Not in the human sense, perhaps. Maybe they identify each other by scent or face or fatal flaw.
As Curtis paws at her with the speed and dexterity of a two-fingered sloth, she lifts her eyes to the popcorn ceiling. She pushed to go back to Curtis's place, not wanting to desecrate her own apartment with what she was willing to admit was an unhinged social experiment, but he resisted.
I've got roommates, he said, his hand already slipping lower than she would have liked.
On the way back, she realized she should have lied and said she had roommates too. Loud ones. Messy ones. Ones likely to peer in and watch.
It is only once she has blocked him from entering her room that she realizes such a claim may not have been far from the truth. Her room is all but taken over by her childhood stuffed animals: her teddy bear, which she stuffed with fluff herself, at a store that has since closed in a mall months from death; her clownfish, a gift from her grandparents soon after the release of Finding Nemo; a sickly-yellow bird torn off her old playmobile, crusty and dangling from a clothes hanger.
He pins her down on the love seat.
Love seat. What an odd term. In what situation would one want to sit right beside their lover? Wouldn't it be better to lie beside them on a sofa? To have one sit on the couch while the other rests on the floor? To talk over a table, or at least with their heads angled toward each other while they stare at their phones?
She doesn't have a couch. It seemed too expensive. She only gotten a love seat because of her parents, who had been eager to help her to move out so they could convert her room into a mini gym that ultimately turned out to be more exciting to build than it was to use.
Why bother with a love seat? she remembers asking. So I can sit on it with my nonexistent boyfriend?
So we can sit on it when we come over, her father said.
That's what the floor is for.
We're too old for that, her mother said, and though Kaede's instinct was to roll her eyes, something about the weariness in her mother's eyes stopped her.
She therefore purchased a love seat she neither liked nor wanted, later delivered by two bumbling strangers, one of whom hit his head on the doorframe on the way out.
"Yeah," Curtis says. He may have said something before this, but she has been doing her best to tune him out. "Oh, yeah, Kay-day."
Her eyes slip back up to the ceiling. Her name is pronounced Kah-eh-deh and, to her recollection, has something to do with either pecans or maple leaves. Though she knows she can hardly be offended when she doesn't know the meaning of her own name, she still wishes people would try harder to say it correctly, or at least call her Kai.
She shifts.
This is taking a lot longer than a minute.
It occurs to her, as he continues bungling her name, that she doesn't know exactly what happens when sloths mate. Is it loud, like the initial call of the female, or is her desperate scream the rowdiest thing about the act?
Wait, she wants to say as Curtis grabs her hair. Not now. I need to find a video of two sloths mating.
If she did - if she said it - would he let her? Would he watch? Would he want to know everything she has learned about sloths? Would he tell her she is fascinating? Would he tell her she is smart? Would he repeat these things at their small and intimate wedding, the microphone feeding back because he is so unused to speaking before a crowd, albeit a small one, he does not know what to do with his hands?
I love you, she wishes she could tell him. I love what you could be. I love what I have made you into, even though you're disappointing.
Then, just when she's about to open her mouth and ask if he can get off her long enough for her to grab her phone, he rolls away, a hummingbird performing a barrel roll to dislodge a pesky bee.
"Man," he says.
Sloth, she thinks. Hummingbird. Bee. These are the many things I can never be.
She tells herself to get up and pee. That's what she's supposed to do. One of the many things she is expected to do, as a functioning member of society.
She closes her eyes. She remembers seeing something that claimed sloths have an average lifespan of twenty to thirty years.
That seems like enough.
Curtis clears his throat. When she opens her eyes, he's standing off to the side, one arm raised so he can point at the love seat beneath her.
"I think you bled a little," he says.
She looks before she can think better of it. The smears of scarlet immediately begin swimming before her eyes. She imagines them pouring out of a sloth's claws. Down their cheeks. Out of their nostrils.
"Out," she says.
"What?"
She rushes to the bathroom. When she thinks of the blood - on the love seat, in her heart - she starts retching hard enough to make her eyes burn.
She's afraid he's going to join her in the bathroom. What he would do, she isn't sure. Comfort her or scold her. Shake his head and say, What a waste of a fancy drink.
Instead, she hears the clink of a belt buckle, then the hiss of the lock. A moment later, the whine of the door as he slips back into the night.
He did just what she wanted.
She thinks she's impressed.
After emptying her stomach and what's left of her soul, she flushes the toilet, washes her hands, and splashes her face without removing her makeup. Her trails of eyeliner dribble into the sink, leaving cloudy splotches. She slides a finger through a light-gray smear and imagines licking it up.
Her face still dripping, she exits the bathroom and makes a beeline for the door. Stepping out, she studies the open-air balcony. The flimsy railing.
When she was young, she and her best friends loved jumping on an unsteady rope bridge while the only male member of their friend group hung from the bottom. He called it slothing and said they would probably kill him one day. As far as she can recall, he never seemed all that cut up about it.
She places a hand on the railing. Dust coats her fingertips. When she peers down, the ground seems very far away.
She watches Curtis leave the building, exiting the stairwell and heading for the stoplight. She waits, curious to see if he'll pause and look up at her.
He doesn't. He just goes, disappearing like a dream.
She returns to her apartment and cleans herself up. She has a feeling she should be concerned about the fact that she bled.
She wonders how sloths can come to understand the ugly things in life: blood and sickness and birth and death. Do their parents explain it to them? Do the children ever cry? Do they ever wish they had never had to learn about such terrible things?
After returning to her bed, her body aching, she decides the sloth experts are most likely wrong. The females aren't screaming to attract mates; they're screaming because they know. They know what it is to be alive. They know what it is to die. They know what it is to only be alive so they can create children who will live, then die. They know they will never be loved the way their mother once loved them. They know they will have children who won't love them until it's too late.
She'll call her mother tomorrow. She'll start cleaning herself up. She won't spend so much time on her phone, wishing for what cannot be.
Under the gaze of her stuffed animals, she clambers into bed. She pictures that boy she hasn't seen in years, his face expressionless as he stared down death.
She wraps her hands around the left and right sides of her bed, her arms spread and her chest pressed to the mattress. Closing her eyes, she takes a breath and hangs on for dear life.
Why toes and fingers are considered interchangeable, Kaede has no idea. A toe is not a finger. She cannot type with her toes. She has, however, seen videos of a very talented artist who, after losing her arms, became very adept at using her toes to hold a paintbrush. Kaede could spend the rest of her life studying art, with the full use of her hands, and still never create anything of worth.
Something else about sloths: When a female sloth enters heat, rather than searching for a mate herself, she simply sits in a tree and screams until a male finds her.
This scream is not dramatic. It is not hysterical. It is straight to the point, as if to say, I would like to get this over with, and most times, it works perfectly. Males lift their heads and start searching for her.
It would be nice if Kaede could attract a mate that way. If she could be the kind of girl who shows up at a bar, orders herself a fruity drink, and waits for someone to approach her and pay her tab.
I've never had a cosmopolitan, she imagines her new suitor saying, so I'll have to live vicariously.
She would not invite him to have a small sip. She would never let a stranger contaminate her drink. How unsanitary. An open invitation to all germs.
Perhaps it doesn't matter. She's not the type to go to bars. Nor is she the type that most boys like. It would be easier, she thinks, if men were just a little more desperate, or else if she had been born a sloth.
She studies her fingers for a moment, her eyes narrowing. If she chopped off two fingers from each hand, would she get any closer to becoming a sloth?
When she stretches out a hand, her fingers tremble. There are a multitude of reasons why she never could have been a surgeon, including but not limited to the fact that she throws up at the sight of blood, but the tremor in her hands is one of the most heartbreaking. She prides herself on being steady in most aspects of life. If only her body didn't betray her so.
She lowers her hand and buries it between her knees.
On second thought, it is possible that she would only need to remove one finger from each hand. Perhaps the pinkie. She remembers reading somewhere that a thumb is not a finger.
Of course, sloths don't have thumbs. Perhaps she would have to lop those off as well. Two pinkies. Two thumbs. Six fingers remaining.
Would she rather remove her toes? That seems less troublesome. She was never all that good at walking anyhow. As a child, she struggled in PE, missing baskets by a mile and tripping over her own feet.
Some of the worst days of her middle-school life were when the girls and boys were set to the run the mile at the same time. Watching the most athletic girls easily lap her had been humiliating enough. Knowing boys could stare at her, could watch the fat on her thighs jiggle more than her still-flat chest, could laugh at her sweaty temples and flushed cheeks and poor form, made her wish she could take off from the starting line and run into another life. One in which she did not have a brain and body she despised.
She is thirty now, and instead of spending her afternoons suffering in PE, she is suffering at home, lying in bed and learning about animals she wished she could have been born as instead.
She has learned on the internet that sloth copulation is quick. From start to finish, it takes a minute, if that.
Maybe she would like that. If it were over that quickly. Maybe then, she wouldn't worry. Maybe then, it would be fun.
Preparing to pull herself out of bed, she swings one leg out from under her blanket. Then, after a pause, she snuggles back in. It's barely five o'clock. No one goes to bars this early. Not if they're only looking for a temporary mate.
The edge of her blanket is soft against her chin. She takes out her phone and continues reading. Apparently, after mating, once the male falls asleep, other males may emerge and approach the waiting female. It is up to her to determine if she wants to mate again. Most times, she will, for the sake of survival.
Yet she is a sloth. She must get tired of it all. Perhaps there are times when she would rather sleep.
Setting down her phone, Kaede buries her face in her pillow. She always rests best when it's hard to breathe.
She can't recall if Curtis is his first or last name, but it hardly seems to matter. She hates it either way.
It serves her right, she supposes. Of course she gets a Curtis. She shouldn't have expected anything better on her first attempt at doing as the female sloths do.
At least it didn't take as long as it does in the wild. Female sloths will call out to mates for eight to ten days each month. These calls grow more frequent as time goes on. By the end, she is screeching every ten to fifteen minutes.
In the dim bar called forSAKEn, a pun on the Japanese word for alcohol, Kaede needed only approximately ten minutes. This is impressive for both sloths and people.
Now home, the hand of this Curtis smashes its way up her torso, as if Kaede is not a woman, or even a sloth, but a tree. One he is climbing rather recklessly.
"Ah," she says.
"Yeah," he grunts. "You like that, don't you?"
She doesn't. That ah was one of pain and slight distress, the same sort of sound she makes after accidentally dropping an ice cube on her foot.
She stares at her wall. The pattern reminds her of oil on water. It's incredibly ugly. She would never repaint.
Technically, she can't. She would have to ask the owner first. She has spoken to them once and has never met them in person.
She likes this. The anonymity is the best part of their relationship.
She wishes she could have maintained the same anonymity with Curtis. She wonders if sloths bother learning their mates' names.
Do sloths have names? She thinks they must. Not in the human sense, perhaps. Maybe they identify each other by scent or face or fatal flaw.
As Curtis paws at her with the speed and dexterity of a two-fingered sloth, she lifts her eyes to the popcorn ceiling. She pushed to go back to Curtis's place, not wanting to desecrate her own apartment with what she was willing to admit was an unhinged social experiment, but he resisted.
I've got roommates, he said, his hand already slipping lower than she would have liked.
On the way back, she realized she should have lied and said she had roommates too. Loud ones. Messy ones. Ones likely to peer in and watch.
It is only once she has blocked him from entering her room that she realizes such a claim may not have been far from the truth. Her room is all but taken over by her childhood stuffed animals: her teddy bear, which she stuffed with fluff herself, at a store that has since closed in a mall months from death; her clownfish, a gift from her grandparents soon after the release of Finding Nemo; a sickly-yellow bird torn off her old playmobile, crusty and dangling from a clothes hanger.
He pins her down on the love seat.
Love seat. What an odd term. In what situation would one want to sit right beside their lover? Wouldn't it be better to lie beside them on a sofa? To have one sit on the couch while the other rests on the floor? To talk over a table, or at least with their heads angled toward each other while they stare at their phones?
She doesn't have a couch. It seemed too expensive. She only gotten a love seat because of her parents, who had been eager to help her to move out so they could convert her room into a mini gym that ultimately turned out to be more exciting to build than it was to use.
Why bother with a love seat? she remembers asking. So I can sit on it with my nonexistent boyfriend?
So we can sit on it when we come over, her father said.
That's what the floor is for.
We're too old for that, her mother said, and though Kaede's instinct was to roll her eyes, something about the weariness in her mother's eyes stopped her.
She therefore purchased a love seat she neither liked nor wanted, later delivered by two bumbling strangers, one of whom hit his head on the doorframe on the way out.
"Yeah," Curtis says. He may have said something before this, but she has been doing her best to tune him out. "Oh, yeah, Kay-day."
Her eyes slip back up to the ceiling. Her name is pronounced Kah-eh-deh and, to her recollection, has something to do with either pecans or maple leaves. Though she knows she can hardly be offended when she doesn't know the meaning of her own name, she still wishes people would try harder to say it correctly, or at least call her Kai.
She shifts.
This is taking a lot longer than a minute.
It occurs to her, as he continues bungling her name, that she doesn't know exactly what happens when sloths mate. Is it loud, like the initial call of the female, or is her desperate scream the rowdiest thing about the act?
Wait, she wants to say as Curtis grabs her hair. Not now. I need to find a video of two sloths mating.
If she did - if she said it - would he let her? Would he watch? Would he want to know everything she has learned about sloths? Would he tell her she is fascinating? Would he tell her she is smart? Would he repeat these things at their small and intimate wedding, the microphone feeding back because he is so unused to speaking before a crowd, albeit a small one, he does not know what to do with his hands?
I love you, she wishes she could tell him. I love what you could be. I love what I have made you into, even though you're disappointing.
Then, just when she's about to open her mouth and ask if he can get off her long enough for her to grab her phone, he rolls away, a hummingbird performing a barrel roll to dislodge a pesky bee.
"Man," he says.
Sloth, she thinks. Hummingbird. Bee. These are the many things I can never be.
She tells herself to get up and pee. That's what she's supposed to do. One of the many things she is expected to do, as a functioning member of society.
She closes her eyes. She remembers seeing something that claimed sloths have an average lifespan of twenty to thirty years.
That seems like enough.
Curtis clears his throat. When she opens her eyes, he's standing off to the side, one arm raised so he can point at the love seat beneath her.
"I think you bled a little," he says.
She looks before she can think better of it. The smears of scarlet immediately begin swimming before her eyes. She imagines them pouring out of a sloth's claws. Down their cheeks. Out of their nostrils.
"Out," she says.
"What?"
She rushes to the bathroom. When she thinks of the blood - on the love seat, in her heart - she starts retching hard enough to make her eyes burn.
She's afraid he's going to join her in the bathroom. What he would do, she isn't sure. Comfort her or scold her. Shake his head and say, What a waste of a fancy drink.
Instead, she hears the clink of a belt buckle, then the hiss of the lock. A moment later, the whine of the door as he slips back into the night.
He did just what she wanted.
She thinks she's impressed.
After emptying her stomach and what's left of her soul, she flushes the toilet, washes her hands, and splashes her face without removing her makeup. Her trails of eyeliner dribble into the sink, leaving cloudy splotches. She slides a finger through a light-gray smear and imagines licking it up.
Her face still dripping, she exits the bathroom and makes a beeline for the door. Stepping out, she studies the open-air balcony. The flimsy railing.
When she was young, she and her best friends loved jumping on an unsteady rope bridge while the only male member of their friend group hung from the bottom. He called it slothing and said they would probably kill him one day. As far as she can recall, he never seemed all that cut up about it.
She places a hand on the railing. Dust coats her fingertips. When she peers down, the ground seems very far away.
She watches Curtis leave the building, exiting the stairwell and heading for the stoplight. She waits, curious to see if he'll pause and look up at her.
He doesn't. He just goes, disappearing like a dream.
She returns to her apartment and cleans herself up. She has a feeling she should be concerned about the fact that she bled.
She wonders how sloths can come to understand the ugly things in life: blood and sickness and birth and death. Do their parents explain it to them? Do the children ever cry? Do they ever wish they had never had to learn about such terrible things?
After returning to her bed, her body aching, she decides the sloth experts are most likely wrong. The females aren't screaming to attract mates; they're screaming because they know. They know what it is to be alive. They know what it is to die. They know what it is to only be alive so they can create children who will live, then die. They know they will never be loved the way their mother once loved them. They know they will have children who won't love them until it's too late.
She'll call her mother tomorrow. She'll start cleaning herself up. She won't spend so much time on her phone, wishing for what cannot be.
Under the gaze of her stuffed animals, she clambers into bed. She pictures that boy she hasn't seen in years, his face expressionless as he stared down death.
She wraps her hands around the left and right sides of her bed, her arms spread and her chest pressed to the mattress. Closing her eyes, she takes a breath and hangs on for dear life.
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/2iz6B5V
via IFTTT
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