Lourdes crawled out of the tent on the beach and into the horribly blue morning, wearing a pink robe spotted with lotus blossoms that had arrived in a suitcase on the shore yesterday evening along with the other detritus arriving from Japan’s shores. She went to the embers of the bonfire and began to reignite the blaze.
The 7.3-Richter level earthquake had shaken Japan a few months back. Images flooded international television screens of crumbled high-rises, trapped children underneath wooden pillars, cows on roofs and people trapped in temples on hilltops. The country had continued to recover from the natural disaster in the time since. The lost items of Japanese citizens continued to float across the Pacific and had begun to arrive on the western coast of the Americas.
Lourdes had heard from a fellow migrant in a bar in Spokane that he had found a black briefcase with a collection of Hublot watches along the shoreline. Gossip in the bar continued and Lourdes was able to convince her boyfriend to take a camping trip for a day to see what they could find by combing some vacant beaches.
The woman blew into the embers. The heat roared back to life. She poked at the sticks and looked out to the rolling waves, possibilities of jetsam fortunes and pilgrim goods cast across the blue of the waters, blue of the morning sky, the color coming to mean something different than the drowning and suffocation Lourdes associated with the palette — blue means sad, means misery even with fanfare, means a prodding sensation she felt within her lungs that the water that is needed to sustain life is filled with foreign bodies.
Lourdes looked out into the waves. Soon, she saw a white box bobbing towards the shoreline. She stood up from the fire and walked closer to the surf. She deduced that the handles and unsymmetrical division of the box meant that it was a refrigerator.
She grew curious. As the refrigerator approached the surf, she waded into the water to push it onto land, wetting the bottom of her robe. The box read Frigidaire in partially rusted cursive. She pushed the box as much as she could onto the sand of the beach, the barnacles at the base scraping along the sand.
She opened the box. Inside was a perfectly healthy young Japanese man, sunburnt from the waist up and sucking on a stalk of bok choy. Lourdes screamed. Her boyfriend continued to snore while the Japanese man yawned awake.
He shielded his eyes from the sun. He asked in Japanese, ”Where am I?”
Lourdes did not understand, but she assumed he was asking where he was at. She said in English, “You are in America.”
“Huh,” he said, and then in English, “that’s nice…that’s really nice.”
The two looked at each other. Lourdes felt a sudden pang of guilt about the robe she was wearing. She had the feeling that she was doing something wrong by combing the beach for misplaced items that had, or continued to have, rightful owners, like an even lazier and therefore more embarrassing graverobber.
Lourdes wanted to get rid of her guilt fast. “Want a marshmallow?”
“Do you have any water?”
“We have Pepsi.”
The young man nodded and stepped out of the refrigerator. The two of them headed towards the fire near the tent.
“I’m Junpei.” His voice cracked.
“Lourdes.”
As Lourdes poured the young man a cup of soda, he rapidly glanced across the beach. He swiveled his head, wrung his hands, and yet his legs remained perfectly in place.
“Everything ok?”
“Yes, yes…yes. I apologize, it’s just been, been a few months since I’ve been on land. I’ve paced about my vessel so my legs wouldn’t atrophy, even swam a little while tethered with ropes of plastic wrappings…Yes, I apologize…I guess, the proper way to put it, or to simply say…There’s a lot of space here. My home has been small these past few weeks. I’m not used to…I don’t trust these wide spaces…Yes, the ground is different. Even the air. But the sun rises strangely even though I am on the same Earth. It feels like a new eye is looking at me.”
Lourdes attempted to hand the cup over to Junpei, but he began to take a step backwards. He looked her up and down. “I’m dreaming,” he mumbled. “Yes, dreaming. I’m going back. Everything colorful — orange carrots, purple onions, chocolate cookies, too. Safe and sound…safe and sound.”
Junpei turned and walked across the sand back to the refrigerator, his safe, white box. He crouched into the vessel and shut the door.
Lourdes stood confused for a moment. Then, she was hit with a pang of sympathy for the young man who was so far from home. She disrobed and reentered her tent, back to the comforting snores housed within the cotton tent figuring she would wait for Junpei to come out on his own, the blue in the sky slowly dissipating towards the familiar afternoon.
J.B. Kalf is currently slipping on ice. Has been published or is forthcoming within Beaver Magazine, The Shore, Poetry Lab Shanghai, Roi Faineant, Prosetrics, Hot Pot Magazine, Does It Have Pockets, #Ranger, and elsewhere. Prefers limes to lemons and can be found on Instagram @enchilada_photo and Twitter @enchilada89.
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